Download RADICAL NATIONALISM IN BRITISH WEST AFRICA

RADICAL NATIONALISM IN BRITISH WEST AFRICA, 1945-60
by
Nike L. Edun Adebiyi
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(History)
in The University of Michigan
2008
Doctoral Committee:
Professor Ali Mazrui, Co-Chair, University of Binghamton
Professor Fred Cooper, Co-Chair, New York University
Professor Geoff Eley
Associate Professor Janet Hart
@ Nike L. Edun Adebiyi
All rights reserved
2008
Dedication
To Father God in Christ Jesus, Lord and Savior
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank all those who have in one way or the other been helpful in the
course of bringing this dissertation to successful completion. I thank members of my
dissertation committee: Ali A. Mazrui, Geoff Eley, Fred Cooper, and Janet Hart for their
contributions. I am grateful to Ali Mazrui for his support. I also wish to thank the
following for their support and kindness in the course of my career at Michigan: Mary
Jarrett, Don Perigo, Gwen Awai, Delories Sloan, Eunice Royster Harper, Valerie Eaglin,
Stephanie Amaker, Robert Holmes, and Hank Heitowit. I thank my friends who are too
numerous to mention. I am grateful to the loving support of my parents, brother, and
above all my children. Their unreserved love, admiration, and respect for me have meant
more to me than they could ever imagine. I wish them every success as they follow their
own career path and passion.
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Preface
My interest in the phenomenon of nationalism as an intellectual subject has been longstanding. I came to the study of nationalism and radicalism in colonial West Africa in the
late 70s and early 80s during my tenure as a lecturer in the Department of History,
University of Ibadan, Nigeria where I designed and taught courses in Modern African
Political Thought and in other select themes. In the course of teaching this class, I
became engaged with the subject of nationalism and posed the issue of rethinking the
phenomenon in new ways to enrich prevailing scholarship on the subject in regard to
Africa. My rethinking of this subject led to my decision to explore it further and resulted
in various unpublished papers in the 80s and 90s,1 culminating in an earlier draft of my
doctoral dissertation.2 The insights in this present work and its methodological
framework derive most importantly from this earlier draft of my doctoral dissertation and
from my earlier works and papers since the 80s. They are all based on my findings from
archival research work I carried out in the British archives and from preliminary research
in the Nigerian archives, from newspaper reports, Legislative Council Debates documents
for the colonies, rare manuscripts, memoirs, etc., as well as select interviews carried out
earlier in Nigeria with famed activists of the period under study: labor left leader Michael
Imoudu, Islamic feminist, Alhaja Hajiyya Sawaba Gambo, and ex-Zikist, Nwafor Orizu.3
These are supplemented with information from secondary materials. 4 Additional
material is provided in this study from the British Documents on the End of Empire
(BDEE) series.
This study confronts the nationalist problematic at a particular historical juncture
in British West Africa from a reconstituted methodological and epistemological
framework in the attempt to provide further understanding of the phenomenon of
nationalism and of the process that ended empire in British West Africa. It seeks to
examine perspectives on community and citizenship and how people were re-imagining
the boundaries of their world and the future and seeking to reorder their lives especially
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in the period of rapid political decentralization in what turned out to be the last decades of
British colonial rule. The study examines the shifting political boundaries and how
people were seeking to reposition themselves vis-à-vis the community, and the
coordinates that determined individual formulations of rights and belongings. In its
attempt to fill a lacuna in the historiography of the nationalist phenomenon and of the end
of empire in British West Africa, the study also explores the category of the “communist”
which was being added to British imperialist discourse in the period under study. It seeks
to reveal the effects of British officialdom’s perceptions of communism in the West
African colonies and their reaction to the perceived radicalism of the left among colonial
social radicals on the contestations over community and citizenship among colonial
social forces, and on the social, legal, and political contexts that defined the
Independence Constitutions.
In attempting to explore aspects of the cultural and political contestations in the
public sphere over community and notions of citizenship especially among African
ethnopolitical entrepreneurs and colonial social radicals in this period, the study examines
how they and their organizations constructed their arguments and actions relative to each
other and what they were doing with the categories of, i.e., “race,” “ethnicity,” “gender,”
“class,” “religion,” in their discourses and social and political practice. As Brubaker has
commented, categories are for doing.5 The social radicals’ perspectives of citizenship are
examined to involve an understanding of citizenship in inclusive terms and understood as
the set of practices – juridical, political, economic, and cultural – which define a person
and through which persons define themselves as competent members of society. They
attempted to make the categories of race, ethnicity, gender, class, religion, etc., into
“nation” in mutually-inclusive terms. The ethnopolitical entrepreneurs’ discourses and
perspectives of the “nation” and of citizenship and their categories are examined to be
predicated on narrower forms of cultural and political address. Their discursive practices
are examined to involve the making of categories of, i.e., race, ethnicity, gender, class,
religion into “nation” in mutually-exclusive terms. Their discourses are conceptualized
as the master-discourse and the discourses of colonial radicals are conceptualized as the
supplementary-discourse, following Homi Bhabha’s concept of the master-discourse and
the supplementary-discourse.6
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The analytical concepts and categories applied in this study, including the
category of social radicalism, are problematized and the study seeks to reconceptualize
them in processual and relational terms and to apply them as coordinates. It is noted in
this, for example, that the phenomenon of social radicalism, like that of the broader
phenomenon of nationalism, was complex, contradictory, and shifting and that the
radicals were not social radicals in all respects. They are problematized as also sharing
some relational characteristics with other colonial social forces, including the
ethnopolitical entrepreneurs. The radicals’ attitude to tradition, for example, could be
problematic. Thus, one finds the renowned feminist, Funlayo Ransome-Kuti (FRK) of
Nigeria, whose life and energies were devoted to contesting received understanding of
rights and duties and to reconstituting these, in particular, gender norms, in more
equitable terms, advocating for the rights of the Ogboni male fraternity in the
reconstituted Egba Central Council (ECC) in Abeokuta on the basis of their traditional
rights, “rights” which conflicted with the rights of women in the same Council.7 In their
suggested reforms of the Egba Native Administration, she and the women in the
Abeokuta Women’s Union (AWU) advocated, among other things, that “the legitimate
rights of the Ogboni Chiefs should be restored to them.”8 She failed to see that those
traditional rights constrained against the rights of women in the newly reconstituted ECC
and other governing Councils into which the colonial government was now for the first
time allowing a few women, including FRK, to enter. Ironically, the same Ogbonis were
at the same time protesting against the representation of women in these Councils as
“contrary to Egba customs and tradition” and requested that the colonial government
remove the women from these Councils!9 Many of the colonial social radicals could be
said to lack a proper appreciation of culture as a signifying system, “the signifying
system through which necessarily (though among other means) a social order is
communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored.”10
Also, many of the radicals and their organizations had emerged from the womb of
the more mainstream political organizations and/or parties whose leadership was
composed of African politicians located more right of center and center on the
ideological spectrum, although the social radicals’ intent was to radicalize these more
mainstream political organizations and parties and leadership from within. In Nigeria, for
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example, the Zikist radicals had emerged from the National Council of Nigeria and the
Cameroons (NCNC) party in 1948, and the Northern Elements Progressive Union
(NEPU) radicals from the broader but cultural and conservative organization in the
North, the Northern Peoples’ Congress (NPC) in 1950, and in the Gold Coast, the labor
radicals from the Convention People’s Party (CPP), etc. Even women radicals had gone
into alliance with these more mainstream organizations at certain periods of their political
movements and parties, though mostly short-lived. FRK allied the AWU with the NCNC
and later in the 50s, her Commoner Peoples’ Party with the NPC and Cummings-John of
Sierra Leone allied her Sierra Leone Women’s Movement (SLWM) with the more
centrist/right of center mainstream political organization in the Sierra Leone Protectorate,
the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP). The women had also believed in impacting
these otherwise gendered mainstream political organizations from within. But the social
radicals could not long subsist in these organizations and most were either expelled,
forced out, or disengaged from these parties out of frustration. This is because their
vision of community and notions of citizenship premised on the realization of equality
before the law and to become an underlying principle for social, economic, and cultural
action, conflicted with, as well as challenged the more mainstream notions of citizenship
that sought to concentrate all lines of affiliation into a single, totalizing, unmediated, and
exclusionary version of the national community.
For example, the political organization of social radicals in the North of Nigeria,
NEPU, founded with the objective of fundamentally changing the norms in this
conservative Islamic-ruled society, had represented a direct attack on the status quo right
from its founding. With its motto Yama (freedom) symbolizing three freedoms –
political, economic and social – it sought at its creation in 1950 within the NPC to fight
for the grassroot against the constraints of the feudal social structure of the emirate
system which the British Indirect Rule system had largely preserved and perpetuated in
many ways there. NEPU’s program for local government reforms involved a serious
attempt at establishing grassroot democracy. Powerful emirs and certain administrative
officers regarded the NEPU within the NPC then, with its radicalizing initiatives, as a
dangerously radical group and effected the elimination of the radical elements from the
NPC at an early stage. Their socially radical program and attempts to redefine the
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political culture and norms in this Northern Nigerian society in more egalitarian ways
directly challenged both the traditional rulers and the colonial authority who would
together continue to seek to marginalize NEPU and the radicals. The Zikists in the
NCNC, labor radicals in the Convention People’s Party (CPP) in the Gold Coast, and
other organizations and/or coalitions of social radicals in mainstream organizations, also
experienced similar hostility and reactionary measures, including expulsion, by leaders of
these parties. In the case of women radicals, the narrow organizational structures and
agendas of the more mainstream parties with which they went into alliance marginalized
them and their organizations in those parties and they also failed to impact them from
within.
The social radicals stood outside these more mainstream organizations and
parties, then, challenging the framings and narrative encodings of community and
citizenship as constituted in the discursive practices of African ethnopolitical
entrepreneurs who led those parties. The radicals contested the differences among
citizenry that were ordered by class, religion, gender, and other logics of centeredness
and marginalization inscribed in mainstream construction of community and notions of
citizenship. They challenged the perceived exploitation and patterns of domination and
exclusion concealed in the use of language of ethnicity, race, religion, class, etc., by the
ethnopolitical entrepreneurs.11 The colonial social radicals stood in a somewhat
dialectical relationship vis-à-vis the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs and their organizations,
but without negating the reconstituted social contradictions of the past or present, or
turning contradictions into a dialectical process. They stood, rather, as the supplementary
space of cultural signification, challenging the power of what became the dominant
discourse, i.e., the master-discourse, and antagonizing its power to generalize and its
tendencies to totalize the social in a “homogenous empty time.”12 Colonial social
radicals imagined the nation more in inclusive terms as a new kind of community based
on citizenship conceived of as a kind of “fraternity of equals” and a “deep horizontal
comradeship.” Their discourse and social and political practices are posited as falling
largely outside the terms of the social, political, and cultural imaginings that
ethnopolitical entrepreneurs’ idea of the nation and citizenship entailed.
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This study seeks to examine the process of delegitimization and entitlement
among citizenry and the language and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion involved in
this process, i.e., the native/stranger, autochtony/allochtony duality, etc., in the
immediate pre-independence period. It seeks to examine the creation of new boundaries
of exclusion, as well as aspects of the complex process by which inclusion in the nation
was competed for and claimed in this period.
In my attempt to reconstitute the narrative of nationalism and to provide fresh
perspectives on the phenomenon of nationalism and the end of empire in British West
Africa, my work also explores the making of the category of the “communist” by British
officialdom and to what effects. It examines British officialdom’s imperialist anticommunist framework, their distinction between the “respectable,” i.e., “moderate”
African, and the “extremist” and “communist” African, and in particular, their application
of the category of the communist to colonial social radicals and to anybody that they did
not like. It seeks to examine the effect of this categorization and of the imperial anticommunist framework on the dynamics of the competing framings of community and
notions of citizenship among colonial social forces, and on the process that ended empire.
The colonial social radicals’ discourses and social and political practices are
posited in this study to represent alternative space for the construction of community and
framings of citizenship but were delegitimized by British officialdom who sought to close
the space for the imagining of community and citizenship in the socially transforming
terms in which the radicals were seeking to privilege them. This study posits that by
collapsing theirs and other forms of social intervention that officialdom did not like into
the imperial anti-communist grid, British officialdom fairly succeeded in closing the
space for other forms of social intervention that might have mapped out a different,
perhaps more democratic terrain for the future independent African societies.
I seek to examine the twin themes of social radicalism and communism in the
narrative of nationalism and of the process that ended empire in the British West African
colonies in ways that previous literature of nationalism and decolonization in British
West Africa have not addressed or adequately focused on.13 A few works in the last
couple of decades such as Stephen Howe’s (1993),14 and Hakim Adi’s (1998) 15 have
provided important focus on anti-colonialism and the left in Britain. Hakim’s Adi’s study
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comes closest to a focus on nationalism and communism in British West Africa but his
work is limited to an examination of the activities of West African students n Britain.
Perhaps because of the social radicals’ failure to succeed and historians’
predilection to studying the movements that succeeded, the phenomenon of radicalism
and of the associated phenomenon of communism with which they were associated in
British officialdom’s mind have remained fairly neglected in the literature of nationalism
and of the end of empire in British West Africa. But the movements that failed are as
significant, if not more significant than those that succeeded in that they help in the
understanding of the process by which some succeeded while others failed as well as the
nature of the outcome. This study seeks to reveal aspects of the process by which the
terms of the social, political, and cultural imaginings that the ethnopolitical
entrepreneurs’ idea of the nation entailed became the dominant form – the masterdiscourse – and the basis of the Independence Constitutions for the West African
colonies. It attempts to reveal how this process was furthered by British officialdom’s
legitimization of ethnopolitical entrepreneurs’ discourse – the discourse that they would
rather have privileged – and their delegitimization of those which they would rather not
have centered – those of colonial social radicals, etc.
The conflicts and contestations between colonial social radicals and the
ethnopolitical entrepreneurs over the “nation” and notions of citizenship also involved
conflicts and contestations between the social radicals and British officialdom and their
perspectives on community and forms of citizenship. It involved contestations over how
the makers of empire sought to remake or “order” these West African societies in what
turned out to be the last decades of British rule there. The imaginings of community and
citizenship among the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs - the officially-constituted
“moderates” – would find more common grounds with those of British officialdom’s.
They were as gendered and as socially conservative as officialdom’s imaginings of these
African societies and the way they hoped to reorder them. Hence officialdom wished that
the NEPU radicals would leave the status quo alone in the North and have unpolluted
“the Hausa and Fulani of the North, Muslims and warriors, with the dignity, courtly
manners, high bearing and conservative outlook which democracy and the Daily Mirror
have not yet debased,” in the words of the Secretary of State, Mr. Lyttelton, in 1953.16
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British officialdom would wish that radicalized students and intellectuals would not upset
Colonial Office’s “calculations and … the even tenor of political developments among
the slow moving masses,” etc.17
The conflicts and contestations of the last decades of British colonial rule in these
places were also largely disputes over the law and over the terms of the new
constitutions, especially the very last constitution in these colonies – the Independence
Constitution – that would form the legal basis of the new African states. The radicals in
NEPU regarded the 1956 Constitutional Conference as critical because it was the last of
its kind before Nigeria’s independence which had already been agreed to by officialdom
and the political incumbents. NEPU was particularly adamant that the 1956 Conference
should lay a more solid foundation on which a permanent Nigerian constitution would be
established by the Constituent Assembly which would follow the British withdrawal from
the country. NEPU drew attention to the weaknesses in the previous constitutions on
which the final Constitution was being built and suggested ways to amend them.18
Critiquing the 1953/54 London and Lagos Constitutional Conferences, NEPU’s position
paper stated that:
The London and Lagos Conferences of 1953/4 did not
reflect the views of the people of Nigeria as the conferences
were organized by the Colonial Office to effect changes in
the 1950 Constitution without consulting the people of
Nigeria.19
NEPU advocated full participation of all citizens in the making of the new constitution
and was very insistent on the principle of consultation and representativeness. It
emphasized that:
The Party wants an opportunity to be given to the people to
have their say before those alterations are further
entrenched in the political life of Nigeria.20
Funlayo Ransome-Kuti and all the other social radicals also opposed the
unrepresentativeness of the colonial administration and the limitations of the new
constitutions being enacted FRK, commenting on perceived officialdom’s heavyhandedness, and remarking on the way the exiled Alake – the colonial chief – was reimposed on the people of Abeokuta, for example, lamented, referring to British
officialdom, that “these people discussed and sealed a whole nation’s fate without
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consulting the affected people.”21 In her quest for democracy in the government of
Egbaland, Abeokuta, and in her envisioning of community and citizenship in inclusionary
terms, FRK stated that:
When popular discontents have been very prevalent, it may
well be affirmed that there has been generally something
found amiss in the constitution or in the conduct of
government … This is an age of liberty, an age of franchise
and brotherhood, when rulers should give way to popular
opinion.22
This study inquires into the validity or otherwise of officialdom’s categorization
of colonial social radicals as “communist” or communist-influenced and to what extent if
so. It inquires into what the social radicals were actually saying and doing in their
political organizations. It seeks to reveal, for example, how women like Funlayo
Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria and Constance Cummings-John of Sierra Leone, otherwise
middleclass feminists, labeled by British officialdom as “communist” were seeking rather
democratic change and to reconfigure gender norms in more equitable terms. The study
seeks to reveal how more democratically-inclined political organizations like NEPU in
Northern Nigeria, condemned by British officialdom as “extremist,” were also rather
fighting against the ills of the Native Authorities and agitating for the reform and
democratization of the Native Authority System in the North, the emancipation and rights
of women, etc. Officialdom’s remark, in condemning the NEPU radicals, that their
“expressed aims conflict with the existing system of Native Administration” was
precisely what NEPU was about, i.e., challenging the existing system of Native
Administration and its perceived unrepresentativeness and corruption, etc.23 The existing
system’s governing philosophy conflicted with the more democratically inclined
perspectives on community and citizenship of colonial radicals in NEPU. And NEPU
was beginning to win considerable followership and votes on that account and even
British officialdom could not help but acknowledge that also. The British Resident
would acknowledge that NEPU’s “strength lies in its campaign against corruption and
nepotism,” and that “it represents an organized body of political opinion in the North.”24
In spite of that, British officialdom and the Native Authorities would seek to constrain the
ability of NEPU to become a formidable force in the North of Nigeria and officialdom
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would still insist on labeling it as an extremist organization and would seek, with the
NPC, to neutralize NEPU as an opposing political force. Some of the means by which
this was achieved was through continued labeling of NEPU as “extremist” and
“communist,” labels which served to officially delegitimize it, as well as through
limitations inscribed in the 1951 and subsequent Constitutions in Nigeria which seriously
undermined NEPU’s ability to thrive politically.
In Abeokuta, Western Provinces of Nigeria, the British colonial authorities
secretly returned Alake Ademola, the colonial chief, who had been forced to abdicate as a
result of popular movements of protest against him and in which FRK and the Abeokuta
Women’s Union (AWU) were central participants. In spite of the Alake’s glaring abuses
and the desire of the people of Egbaland to elect a new Alake, British officials, in
connivance with the Yoruba Egbe composed of ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, returned
him to the throne surreptitiously in December 1950 without the necessary mandate. In
spite of the Alake’s widespread abuses and mismanagement and intense popular
disenchantment against him, British officialdom continued to favor him and to grant him
capacity. Grassroot opposition movements were constantly derided and reduced to the
activities of a “misguided and mischievous few.” The Chief Commissioner for Western
Provinces, Hoskyns-Abrahall, thanking the Alake and regretting recent demonstrations
and “defiance of authority which had occurred in Abeokuta,” would publicly regret the
“insulting of the Alake,” and other activities of “certain persons who had disturbed the
peace and tranquility of Abeokuta.” 25 He patronizingly declared in his address in
Council Hall, Abeokuta on 27 April, 1948 that “all true sons of Abeokuta must feel with
[him] this sorrow at the misguided and mischievous activities of some of her children.”26
He was referring to the demonstrations and sit-ins in the palace of the Alake by over
10, 000 women demonstrators under the AWU led by Funlayo Ransome-Kuti (FRK).
The women were discursively reduced by British officialdom to the status of children
who did not know what they were doing! The Alake’s position on his return was further
entrenched by his alliance with the Egbe Omo Oduduwa (Egbe), later to be transformed
into the Action Group (AG) political party – the political organization of ethnopolitical
entrepreneurs – led by Obafemi Awolowo. These were the colonial social forces for
whom British officialdom was opening the boundaries of legitimate discourse at the end
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of the 40s and at the turn of the 50s and in the new constitutions enacted from this period
onwards. At the same time, these boundaries were being closed to the social radicals and
to their discourse of the “nation” and of citizenship in socially radical and inclusive terms
– the discourse that officialdom would rather not have centered.
The importance given to communism in the examination of the nationalist
phenomenon in this study and in my earlier works27 is not because there was any
considerable communist presence in British West African colonies as there was, for
example, to some extent in South Africa and in the Sudan at the time. It is not because
communism significantly impacted the imaginings of community and notions of
citizenship among colonial social radicals or any other colonial social forces in British
West Africa because it did not, as this study attempts to reveal. It is also recognized that
the importance of communism itself is diminished in more contemporary times and that
the fear of communism has indeed been overtaken by the fear of Islamic fundamentalism.
Also, class and class-based movements predicated on the ideology of communism have
since been overtaken by political movements based on “nationalism” especially since the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.28 However, this study posits that the theme of
social radicalism and the associated theme of communism explored in this study remain
important for the study of the nationalist phenomenon and of the end of empire in British
West Africa.
The importance of communism for this study is tied to British officialdom’s
perceptions of its importance in their West African colonies from the era of the
Communist International, and particularly in the post-World War II era of the Cold War,
and the way this perception affected officialdom’s deliberations over their West African
empire. British officialdom’s perception of communism in their West African colonies
and among certain colonial forces may be different from the reality, but perception is also
an important ingredient of policy. It affects important decisions such as to when a nation
goes to war, and in the case of this study, when the makers of empire relinquished
empire. This study posits that British officialdom’s perception of communism and its
influence in their West African colonies and among certain colonial social forces was an
important part of the complex dynamics that led to the relinquishing of empire when it
occurred and in what this study considers to be precipitous decolonization, as well as the
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terms on which empire ended. British perceptions of communism in their West African
colonies became their reality.
This study seeks to show how British officialdom’s perceived threat of
communism and its influence in their colonies – real or imagined – ended in a hasty move
to hand over power from the second half of the 1950s to the African “moderates,” those
who they felt would secure their West African colonies within the sphere of Western
influence for the future. As A. B. Cohen, one of the main British policy-makers in the
Colonial Office and a reluctant advocate of rapid political devolution in these colonies,
wrote, it was necessary “to move more rapidly than ideally [we] should wish,”29 if they
were “to keep on good terms with the more responsible political leaders such as Mr.
Nkrumah and his immediate colleagues,” and “not to force the Gold Coast Government
into the hands of extremists.”30 After the 1948 Gold Coast crises and following other
crises in the colonies, the subsequent reforms and rapid grant of new constitutions that
would enable the “moderates” to participate more fully in government was seen as the
“best defense against communism in West Africa,”31 “the only chance of friendly cooperation between [this country] and the West African territories,” and “the best chance
when the time comes of securing a favorable decision by the Gold Coast and Nigeria to
stay within the British Commonwealth,” Cohen further argued in 1951.32 The
recommendations for more far-reaching constitutional changes made by the Watson’s
Committee that investigated the 1948 crisis in the Gold Coast and by the Coussey
Committee that followed the Watson’s Commission were accepted, subject to certain
reservations, by the Colonial Office. The Secretary of State, Arthur Creech Jones, in
defending the decision to accept these recommendations, stated in 1949 that if they were
not prepared to accept them broadly, “moderate opinion will be alienated and the
extremists given an opportunity of gaining further and weightier support and of making
more trouble.”33 In 1953, the Secretary of State, Mr. Lyttelton, in inviting his colleagues
to approve in broad principles the latest proposals by him for new constitutional
instrument for the Gold Coast34 and which would be submitted to the Privy Council early
in 1954, advised that:
The Gold Coast proposals, far reaching as they are, have
been prepared with care by a moderate African
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Government anxious to avoid any break in relations with
the United Kingdom.35
“Their rejection,” he further advised, “would bring to an end settled government by
consent, and forfeit the goodwill towards the United Kingdom and the desire to retain the
British connection.”36 The decision to grant self-government to these colonies, starting
with the Gold Coast in 1956,37 was celebrated by British officialdom as having served to
“cut the ground from under the feet of the Communists” and to have “robbed the
Communists of the familiar imperialist argument.”38 Such was the weight of communism
in their West African colonies on British officialdom’s mind.
The study seeks to show how the British ended up being imprisoned in their own
categories, seeing a coherent communist/leftist threat where there were diverse and
complex interventions being made and therefore seeking a coherent alternative to it, in
the form of moderately conservative “nationalists,” the Interlocuteurs Valables - the
partners worth working with - and in whose hands they left the care of the nation and
ended empire precipitously. This study attempts to document the process by which this
occurred, and the effect of British officialdom’s anti-communist grid on the social, legal,
and political contexts that defined the Independence Constitutions in British West Africa.
Chapter One establishes the conceptual framework of this study and provides a
background exploration and discussion of the salient methodological issues and analytical
categories applied in the study as well as the themes explored in the study in the attempt
to provide further understanding of the phenomenon of nationalism in the last quarter of
British rule in West Africa.
Chapter Two begins to explore the subjectivities of the discourse and construction of
community in the interwar period through some in-depth examination of some social
movements as case-studies. It explores the conflicts of interests on which the social
movements in this period were predicated, involving legal disputations over rights and
duties, etc. It examines the disputations over law, i.e., disputation by men over divorce
laws that eased the marriage restrictions on women and which women were taking full
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advantage of, disputations over laws that restricted free access to village lands, and
disputations over the unrepresentativeness of the Sole Native Authorities, etc. It explores
aspects of the contradictory developments in social structures and social relations and
their effects on local politics and collective identification and individual subjectivities. It
focuses on the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs’ construction of community and the
coordinate of class and community on which their formulation of rights and belongings
were predicated. This chapter also points to objective developments towards mutuallyinclusive categories and of community conceived in more embracing terms of full rights
and belongings but which were being undermined by the subjectivities of the discourse
and construction of community by African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs.
Chapter Three explores the making of the British imperialist category of the communist
from the interwar period. It examines British officialdom’s fear of communism among
West African students overseas and among colonial labor, focusing in particular on the
West African Students Union (WASU) in Britain and on I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson of
Sierra Leone as case studies. It examines aspects of the interactions of West African
overseas students and of Wallace-Johnson with the Colonial Office, as well as with
leftwing organizations and individuals in Britain to reveal the nature of the influences on
them and to what effects. It seeks to begin to examine the actual as opposed to the
imagined threat of communism in British West African colonies among labor and among
colonial students overseas and as sources of communist infiltration into the colonies, if
any. The chapter also seeks to show how the British anti-communist grid was beginning
to collapse into one the different socially relevant interventions of colonial social forces
in the colonies and overseas.
Chapter Four begins to explore the dynamic of change among colonials and among
British officialdom in the post-World War II period. It attempts to examine continuity in
transition and points of conjuncture. It examines some socially relevant interventions of
colonial social forces in the post-World War II period, and focuses in particular on the
conjunctures of the late 40s in the colonies, specifically, the 1948 Gold Coast crisis as a
moment of transition, effecting certain shifts among British officialdom and among
colonials as well. The chapter also explores aspects of the contradictory developments
towards mutually-inclusive categories and mutually-exclusive categories in this period,
xvii
using the AWU movement as a case study. It explores the complex interplay of
categories of gender, class, community, etc., as individuals and social forces sought to
reposition themselves vis-à-vis the community and to reformulate rights and belongings
in the post-World War II period.
Chapter Five explores the shifts in the discourses and practices of British officialdom and
some African politicians subsequent to the 1948 Gold Coast crisis. It explores British
officialdom’s reconstitution of the category of the “responsible African,” i.e., the
“moderate,” and examines how some African politicians like Kwame Nkrumah and
Nnamdi Azikiwe were effectively repositioning themselves to the center from this period
onwards. The chapter seeks to begin to show how the ideological shift among the
African politicians who officialdom was now reconstituting into the category of the
“moderates” also involved the imagining of community and of citizenship in rather
socially conservative ways, i.e., gendered and closed to popular agendas. It seeks to
show how this framing of community and citizenship – the framing that is conceptualized
in this study as the master-discourse - was beginning to be legitimized by officialdom
with the new constitutions being enacted from this period onwards. It examines, at some
length, the contrasting notions of community and citizenship from somewhat left of
center as put forward by Eyo Ita, a member of the 1949/50 Constitutional Review
Committees, in his Minority Report which served as commentary from within on the
master-discourse of the “nation” and of change in mainstream institutions and
organizations. The chapter begins to explore the dialectic of change and the discrepancy
between change and change itself in the post-World War II period.
Chapter Six examines the shifting political boundaries and aspects of how individuals
were seeking to reposition themselves vis-à-vis the community, including the coordinates
that determined individual formulations of rights and belongings in the era of rapid
political devolution of the 50s. It examines the contestations over inclusion and over
rights and entitlements. It explores in particular aspects of how ethnopolitical
entrepreneurs were attempting to reconstitute community and citizenship and to reshape
lines of identification, and the effects of their categorization on self-understanding and
political claims of colonials. It examines what they were doing with categories of i. e.,
ethnicity, religion, gender, class, in their political organizations in this period and to what
xviii
effect. It attempts to examine the gap between the “nationalist” organizations and the
putative groups in whose names they claimed to speak. This is facilitated by the
exploration of aspects of the process of delegitimation and entitlement among citizenry
and the language and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, i.e., the Native/Settler,
Autochthon/Allochthon dichotomy, in the era when the resources of the state were being
directed to the regions and local administrative units and controlled by the African
regional political power and/or political incumbents in the “nationalist” organizations. It
examines languages of exclusion, couched in religious, ethnic, class, and gendered terms.
Chapter Seven explores the construction of inclusion and the forms of citizenship
premised on the realization of equality before the law and to become an underlying
principle for social, economic, and cultural action. It examines who the colonial social
radicals were and what they were saying and doing, including their attempts to
reformulate rights and entitlements in more egalitarian terms. It explores how the social
radicals and their organizations constructed their actions and arguments relative to those
of ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, including their attempts to make the categories of , i.e.,
ethnicity, gender, class, religion, into groupness in mutually-inclusive terms. It also
attempts to examine the actual as opposed to the imagined impact of the international left
and/or communism on them. This chapter examines the limitations of colonial social
radicals and constraints against them and social radicalism, and also offers a critique of
colonial social radicals and social radicalism.
Chapter Eight explores the process that ended empire and integrates the salient themes of
this work to a conclusive and meaningful whole, leading to the grant of political
independence first to the Gold Coast in 1956 and to the rest of British West Africa
subsequently. It explores aspects of the process by which this stage was reached and tied
to British officialdom’s fear of communism in the colonies and their perception of
colonial radicals as “communist.” It examines the effects of these fears and perceptions
among officialdom on the outcome of the cultural and political contestations of
community and citizenship among colonial social forces and on how empire ended. This
is revealed to involve the terms of the social, political, and cultural imaginings that
ethnopolitical entrepreneurs’ idea of the nation entails and which became the dominant
xix
form – the master-discourse – on which the Independence Constitutions for the West
African colonies were largely predicated.
xx
Table of Contents
Dedication ........................................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgements............................................................................................................ iii
Preface ............................................................................................................................... iv
List of Abbreviations .......................................................................................................xxv
Abstract .......................................................................................................................... xxvi
Chapter
1. Conceptual Framework....................................................................................................1
Introduction .............................................................................................................1
The Narrative ...........................................................................................................8
The Problem...........................................................................................................14
The Methodological and Epistemological Problem.............................14
The Problematic of Political Development..........................................19
Radicalism and Communism ................................................................................20
2. Ethnopolitical Entrepreneurs and the Making of Community.......................................22
Introduction............................................................................................................22
Contradictions and Ambiguities ............................................................................23
Ambiguous Categories ................................................................................25
Developing National Societies...........................................................................................27
The West African Colonial Worker and the Development of
Mutually-inclusive Categories..........................................................28
Community and the Socially-relevant Conflicts of Interest ..................................31
Class and Community..................................................................................32
The Benin Water Rate Agitation Movement, 1937-1941......................38
The Gold Coast Cocoa Movements, 1930-31/1937-38 ........................44
3. British Officialdom and the Making of the Communist… ............................................50
Introduction............................................................................................................50
xxi
The Development of the Imperialist Anti-communist Grid...................................53
The Overseas Colonial Student..............................................................................56
Revisiting the West African Students Union (WASU)..........................................61
The Labor Organizer............................................................................................71
The Professional Agitator: I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson..................................74
4. Post-World War II Transitions: Reconstituting Community .........................................82
Introduction............................................................................................................82
The Socially-relevant Interventions.......................................................................83
The Abeokuta Women’s’ Movement (AWU) .............................................86
Contradictory Responses and Interpretations .............................90
The Conjuncture of 1948: Revisiting the 1948 Gold Coast Crisis ........................93
The 1948 Gold Coast Crisis.............................................................97
Perceptions of Communism and the Reconstitution of Officialdom’s Discourse. 99
5. British Officialdom and the Making of the Responsible African: the
Interlocuteurs Valables .....................................................108
Introduction..........................................................................................................108
Turning the Tide ..................................................................................................111
Officialdom’s Shifting Discourse and the Rehabilitation of Official
Minority Views ..................................................................112
Reconstituting the Responsible and the Irresponsible African ............................114
Searching for the Interlocuteurs Valables: the Partners Worth Working With ..123
The Colonial not Worth Working With: Aminu Kano and British Officialdom.126
The Partners Worth Working With .....................................................................130
Nnamdi Azikiwe .......................................................................................130
Kwame Nkrumah ......................................................................................145
Officialdom’s Right Hand of Fellowship ............................................................149
The Idea of Change and Change Itself.................................................................154
Radical Critique of Mainstream Trends from Within..........................................159
Eyo Ita and the Discourse of Community and Citizenship: the Minority
Report.............................................161
6. African Ethnopolitical Entrepreneurs and the Making of Categories into “Nation”:
xxii
the Master-Discourse ..............................................168
Introduction..........................................................................................................168
The “Native/Settler”-“Autochthon/Allochthon” Dichotomy...............................171
The Anti-Agbaje Movement .................................................................172
Going to the People..............................................................................................175
The Iperu/Ogere Crises .............................................................175
Community and the Mechanisms of Inclusions and Exclusions .........................178
Languages of Inclusion and Exclusion ................................................178
Religion......................................................................................181
Gender........................................................................................184
The Marginalization of Popular Issues, Part 1.....................................................186
The Universal Primary Education (UPE) Program .............................................187
The Marginalization of Popular Issues, Part 2.....................................................189
7. Colonial Social Radicals and the Making of Categories into “Nation”:
the Supplementary-discourse .............................................197
Introduction..........................................................................................................197
The Colonials not Worth Working With .............................................................197
Colonial Social Radicals and the Making of Mutually-inclusive
Categories ........................................................................201
Women Radicals ........................................................................201
Hajiyya Sawaba Gambo...................................................203
Women Radicals and British Officialdom’s
Category of the Communist .......................206
Islamic Radicals .........................................................................210
The Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU)........210
NEPU and British Officialdom’s Category of the
Communist............................215
Labor Radicals ..........................................................................218
The Zikists ....................................................................221
Breaks to Radicalism: Structural Limitations ......................................................225
Critique of Radicalism and the Radicals..............................................................229
xxiii
8. Radical Nationalism and Precipitous Decolonization..................................................235
Introduction..........................................................................................................235
Officialdom’s Social Engineering........................................................................236
The Dialectic of Change .....................................................................................242
Managing Change ................................................................................................247
Changing Stasis...........................................................................................247
Control and Self-determination............................................................................248
Social Engineering ...............................................................................................252
Ordered Progress – 1948-1953 ...........................................................................257
Voices from Below .............................................................................................259
Concessions to the Moderates..............................................................................267
The Extremists and Communism.........................................................................271
Officialdom’s Paranoia and more Concessions to the Moderates .......................275
Rushing to Decolonize.........................................................................................283
Select Bibliography..............................................................................................288
xxiv
List of Abbreviations
AG – Action Group
AWU – Abeokuta Women’s Union
BDEE – British Documents of the End of Empire
CPGB – Communist Party of Great Britain
CPP – Convention People’s Party (Gold Coast)
EOO – Egbe Omo Oduduwa
FRK – Funlayo Ransome-Kuti (Anikulapo-Kuti)
ISHW – International of Seamen and Harbor Workers
ITUC-NW - International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers
LAI – League Against Imperialism
MP – Minister of Parliament
NCNC - National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC)
NEPU – Northern Elements Progressive Union
NPC – Northern People’s Congress
NW – Negro Worker
NWU – Nigerian Women’s Union
PRO – Public Relations Office
PRO – Public Records Office (Kew Gardens, London)
SLPP – Sierra Leone Peoples Party
SLWM – Sierra Leone Women’s Movement
SOS – Secretary of State
UGCC – United Gold Coast Convention
USCIA – United States Central Intelligence Agency
WANS – West African National Secretariat
WASU – West African Students Union
WAYL – West African Youth League
xxv
Abstract
This study confronts the problem of nationalism at a particular historical juncture in
British West Africa from a reconstituted methodological and epistemological framework
in the attempt to provide further understanding of the phenomenon of nationalism and of
the process that ended empire in British West Africa, including a historicized
reflection on the terms in which empire ended and the relationship to the crises of
democracy and citizenship in post-independent Africa. It explores aspects of the
colonialism/citizenship interface, and the legacies, continuities, and discontinuities. It
seeks to examine colonial discursive practices of community & citizenship, in particular,
aspects of the political and cultural contestations in the public sphere over community
and notions of citizenship between African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs and colonial
social radicals, and their outcome. It inquires into how they and their organizations
constructed their arguments and actions relative to each other, and what they were doing
with the categories of, i.e., “race,” “ethnicity,” “gender,” “class,” “religion,” and to what
effects. The discourse of ethnopolitical entrepreneurs and of colonial social radicals is
conceptualized as the master-discourse and the supplementary-discourse, respectively,
following Homi Bhabha’s conceptualization. The categories and analytical concepts
applied in this study, including the category of social radicalism, are problematized. The
study seeks to reconceptualize them in processual and relational terms and to apply them
as coordinates. This work is predicated on the organizing principle of conflict to capture
points of conjuncture and of continuity in transition.
In reconstituting the narrative of nationalism in this period, the study also
explores the category of the “communist” which was added to British imperialist
discourse and applied to colonial social radicals and anybody that British officialdom did
not like. It attempts to examine the effects of British imperial anti-communist framework
on the dynamics of the social, political, and cultural imaginings and contestations of
xxvi
community and citizenship and the process that ended in precipitous decolonization. It
seeks to reveal the effects of officialdom’s categorization and anti-communist grid on the
social, legal, and political contexts that defined the Independence Constitutions and to fill
a lacuna in the historiography of nationalism in pre-independence British West Africa.
xxvii
Chapter 1
Conceptual Framework
Introduction
“Nation/Nationalism” in its various practices and/or connotations, be it as a category of
everyday social experience or as a category of analysis, continues to metamorphise and to
engage the interest of scholars as varied sets of analytical perspectives are brought to bear
especially on concepts normally associated with the construct of the nation such as the
construct of “ethnicity,”39 “gender,”40 “class,” etc.41 This study seeks to engage with the
nationalist problematic at a particular historical juncture in British West Africa in its
attempt to shed further light on the nationalist phenomenon and on the end of empire in
British West Africa. It seeks to examine aspects of the cultural and political contestations
of community and citizenship42 in the public sphere among various colonial social forces,
in particular among African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs and colonial social radicals,43
and the political outcomes. It seeks to examine how “community” was being constructed
and how the notion of citizenship was being conceived among these social forces, and
how they and their organizations constructed their actions and arguments relative to each
other and relative to other colonial social forces. By examining the antecedent history in
the colonial period, in particular the pre-independence period, of the conflict and
disconnect between forms of citizenship and national belonging, it attempts to throw
some light on the related problems and conflicts in post-independent African societies. It
examines forms of citizenship premised on the realization of equality before the law and
to become an underlying principle for social, economic, and cultural action, and forms of
citizenship that sought to concentrate all lines of affiliation into a single, totalizing,
unmediated, and exclusionary version of the national community. The former vision and
tendencies are located in this study among the social radicals and the latter are located
among the ethnopolitcal entrepreneurs. Also, by exploring British officialdom’s
1
distinction between the “respectable” African and the “extremist/communist,” the study
seeks to reveal how this categorization affected the outcome of the contestations among
colonial social forces and the nature of the Independence Constitutions. It seeks to show
how British officialdom fairly succeeded in this and other ways in closing the space for
other forms of social intervention that might have mapped out a different, perhaps more
democratic terrain for the future independent African societies than the ones privileged
by officialdom.
This study seeks to examine aspects of what African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs
and the social radicals were doing with the categories of, i.e., “ethnicity,” “race,”
“religion,” “class,” “gender,” in their discourses and social and political practices and to
what effect.44 It examines the construction of inclusion and boundaries of exclusion, i.e.,
the making of categories of “ethnicity,” “class,” “religion,” “gender,” in mutuallyinclusive and mutually-exclusive terms, as well as aspects of the complex process by
which inclusion in the nation was competed for and claimed. It posits that the social and
political and cultural imaginings that the “nation” and notions of citizenship entailed
among ethnopolitical entrepreneurs involved narrower forms of cultural and political
address. The social radicals’ imaginings of the “nation” in more inclusive terms and their
notions of citizenship understood as full membership of the human community –
pertaining to civic, political, and social rights – are posited to fall in important ways
outside the terms that the idea of the nation and citizenship entailed among the
ethnopolitical entrepreneurs.
The social forces examined in this study and the categories applied are
problematized and attempt is made to reconceptualize them in processual and relational
terms. No social force is conceived to exist as a homogenous entity but is conceived to
subsist in a complex, and sometimes dialectical relationship to each another. Thus,
while elements of the terms in which social radicals conceived of community and
citizenship are identified as falling outside the terms in which ethnopolitical
entrepreneurs sought to conceive them, social radicals’ discourses could also be located,
paradoxically, within those terms even as the radicals attempted to change them.45 Also,
some of the social radicals, perhaps unselfconsciously, still identified with certain
cultures of more mainstream organizations.
2
The radical spectrum is also not free of contradictions. The study notes that the
social radicals in question were not social radicals in all respects. People left on some
questions, such as property questions, were conservative on other questions, i.e., gender
questions and vice versa. Also, anti-imperialism and social radicalism could be quite
contradictory in that imperialism provided ideological tools against male patriarchy in
certain respects, such as divorce laws. For example, in Guinea, French West Africa, in
the same period under study, while many men in Sekou Toure’s radical Rassemblement
Democratique Africain (RDA) party may condone the very active and “revolutionary”
public roles the women in the party were playing in the anti-colonial movement, they
were resentful of the liberating effects women’s emancipatory roles in the public sphere
were having on gender relations in the private/domestic sphere!46 Social radicals’
attitude towards tradition and culture also proved contradictory at times. Thus, one finds
the renowned feminist, Funlayo Ransome- Kuti (FRK), who headed the AWU in
Abeokuta, Southern Nigeria in the late 40s and the Nigerian Women’s Union (NWU) to
which the AWU was subsequently transformed, and whose life and energies were
devoted to changing gender norms in more equitable terms, busy defending the
traditional rights of the men in the newly reconstituted Egba Central Council (ECC) in
ways that she failed to perceive potentially undermined the equal representation of the
women. 47 She advocated for the rights of the Ogboni male fraternity in the ECC on the
basis of tradition while, ironically, the same Ogboni male fraternity were publicly asking
the government to remove her and the handful of women from the same ECC and other
institutions to which the women were at last being nominated by colonial authorities as
“contrary to Egba custom and tradition.”48 Furthermore, some of those with the closest
connection with international left in their young days such as Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo
Kenyatta ended up in the socially conservative group. However, there are identifiable
distinctions between the discursive practices of colonial social radicals and those of the
ethnopolitical entrepreneurs examined in this study that are salient and of significance for
this study.
By examining what colonial social radicals were doing with the categories of
ethnicity, gender, class, etc., the study attempts to reveal their endeavors to privilege the
discourse of community and of citizenship in mutually-inclusive terms. Colonial social
3
radicals sought to privilege the discourse of democracy and popular sovereignty and
citizenship at the center of national discourse especially at a time of rapid new
constitutional enactments and political devolution of the late 40s and early 50s when the
possibilities for realizing such goals were perceived to be promising. Their discourse of
the “nation” and notions of citizenship are posited in this study to represent a metonymic
interruption in the representation of the people in what became mainstream discourse of
the nation – the master-discourse - in the period under study. African ethnopolitical
entrepreneurs’ practices of “ethnic,” “racial,” and “national” categorization are examined
to involve the mystification of the past, predicated on appeals to a prior community of
interests or cultures as if bounded and/or fixed and of the nation as a homogenous entity.
Their use of vernaculars, such as omo ibile, i.e., “sons of the soil,” and of the
native/settler, local/stranger (autochthony/allochthony) duality, are examined to serve as
loose qualifiers and as binary operators, marking a distinction between “in” and “out” in
ambiguous manner and thus permitting them to leave open multiple interpretations and to
draw energy from their imprecise overlaps with other powerful pre-existing identity
polarities at particular scales of identity and difference.49 This study seeks to examine
aspects of the ambivalence of language in the narratives of the nation and notions of
citizenship among the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs especially. It seeks to examine the
ambivalent temporalities of the nation-space,50 the janus-faced discourse of the nation,
the bifurcations in the framing of the nation, the indeterminacies and contradictions, the
dialectic of political innovation and actually existing cultures, and the in-between space
of the nation in the “nation-talk” and practices of African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs in
particular.
Colonial social radicals contended with the construction of community51 and
citizenship in the terms in which African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs were privileging
them. They challenged their privileging of an idealized prior community and of the past
and sought to reveal the actualities of social fragmentation, “class” divisions, “gender”
and “ethnic” exclusions, and hierarchies, and relations of power. Such “prior
communities” were not bounded as they are themselves always in the process of
historical formation and change and are usually much more divided and contested than
may be apparent or believed to be. This study seeks to examine the question of power
4
inequality and the silencing of voices within the common culture52 in what became
mainstream discourse of the “nation” and of citizenship located among African
ethnopolitical entrepreneurs. The discourse of ethnopolitical entrepreneurs is
conceptualized as the master-discourse and the discourse of colonial radicals is
conceptualized as the supplementary-discourse or minority-discourse, following Homi
Bhabha’s concept of the master-discourse and the supplementary/minority discourse. 53
The social radicals’ discourse is further represented in this study as the
“supplementary space” of cultural signification. Homi Bhabha has noted that the
supplementary strategy is significant because it affects the narrative structure of modern
political rationality.54 As Gasche suggested, “supplements … are pluses that compensate
for a minus in the origin.”55 Homi Bhabha further elaborated that supplementary strategy
suggests that adding “to” need not “add up” but may disturb the calculation,56 noting that:
The supplementary strategy interrupts the successive
seriality of the narrative of plurals and pluralism by
radically changing their mode of articulation. In the
metaphor of the national community as the ‘many as one,’
the one is now both the tendency to totalize the social in a
homogenous empty time, and the repetition of that minus in
the origin, the less-than-one that intervenes with a
metonymic, iterative temporality.57
“The discourse of minority,” he further commented, “reveals the insurmountable
ambivalence that structures the equivocal movement of historical time,”58 and summized
that:
Minority discourse acknowledges the status of national
culture - and the people - as a contentious, performative
space of the perplexity of the living in the midst of the
pedagogical representations of the fullness of life.59
Although colonial social radicals did not turn contradictions into a dialectical
process they remained significant as the supplementary space of cultural signification.
They contested the differences among citizenry that were ordered by class, religion,
gender, and other logics of centeredness and marginalization inscribed in mainstream
construction of the nation and citizenship. By insinuating themselves into the terms of
reference of the dominant discourse and antagonizing its power to generalize, and by
interrupting the “successive seriality of the narrative of plurals and pluralism, etc.,”60
5
colonial social radicals’ discourse and practices represented attempts to radically change
the mode of articulation of the master-discourse. As Homi Bhabha further noted in
regard to the supplementary, “the power of supplementarity is not the negation of the
reconstituted social contradictions of the past or present,” but “its force lies … in the
renegotiation of those times, terms, and traditions through which we turn our uncertain,
passing contemporaneity into the sign of history.”61 This study seeks to explore how
colonial social radicals sought to renegotiate and reconfigure the terms of their individual
and collective incorporation in society and their contestation of the terms in which
ethnopolitical entrepreneurs were seeking to reconstitute community and citizenship in
the era of rapid political decentralization.
In its focus on colonial social radicals and the theme of radicalism in general, the
study also seeks to explore the theme of communism and its significance in the dynamic
of the process that ended empire in this region. It seeks to explore the making of the
category of the “communist” by British officialdom and its effect on the dynamics of the
process of “nation-forming” in the last quarter of British colonial rule. It explores British
officialdom’s anti-communist framework and their tendencies to collapse colonial social
radicals62 and their discourses and practices, as well as anyone they did not like, into one
undivided category of the “communist.”63 It seeks to examine the effects of British
perceptions of communism in the colonies and of their application of the category of the
‘communist’ to colonial social radicals, and the impact of this categorization on the
contesting discourse and construction of community and citizenship among colonial
social forces. It examines the effect on the construction of inclusions and exclusions and
the process of legitimization and delegitimization. It posits that British perceptions of
communism in these West African colonies and their anti-communist grid was an
important part of the dynamics of the process by which empire ended precipitously - and
of the terms on which political independence was achieved in British West Africa.64 The
theme of communism in British West Africa and in the process that ended empire there
has been largely a neglected theme in the literature of the events of this period and of
decolonization.65 This is perhaps because of the actual lack of communist presence in
these colonies. But the perception of its presence by British officialdom in these colonies
and among certain colonial social forces or individuals make it significant as perception
6
is also an important ingredient of policy, affecting important decisions as to when a
nation goes to war, for example, and in the case of this study, when the makers of empire
relinquished empire. British officialdom’s perception of communist presence or
influence in their West African colonies may be different from the reality but their
perception was also their reality. The study seeks to reveal how British officialdom’s
perception of communism in their West African colonies also shaped in important ways
the social, cultural, and political context that formed the basis of the Independence
Constitutions of these colonies. As such, it is believed to merit the attention given to it in
this study.
My work seeks to show how the British ended up being imprisoned in their own
categories, seeing a coherent communist/leftist threat where there were diverse and
complex interventions66 being made and therefore seeking a coherent alternative to it, in
the form of moderately conservative ‘nationalists’- the Interlocuteurs Valables, i.e., the
“moderates.” The study argues that British officialdom’s perceived threat of communism
and its influence in their colonies – real or imagined – contributed in part to what this
study regards as precipitous decolonization in their West African colonies. This involved
a hasty move by British officialdom from the second half of the 50s to hand over power
to the “moderates,” those that they felt would secure these West African colonies within
the sphere of Western influence. It represented a pre-emptive move against the chances
of the perceived colonial radicals – the “communists” - from gaining power or control
and hence of the colonies falling into the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union.67 As
Andrew Cohen, one of the main British policy-makers in the Colonial Office and an
otherwise reluctant advocate of rapid constitutional change, advised in 1951, the British
government may not be able to adhere to an ideal time-table.68 He envisioned that they
might be forced, if they were to keep on good terms with “the more responsible political
leaders such as Mr. Nkrumah and his immediate colleagues and not to force the Gold
Coast Government into the hands of extremists, to move more rapidly than ideally they
should wish.”69 The grant of new constitutions that would enable the “moderates” to
participate in government was seen as the “best defense against communism”70 and the
decision to grant self-government to these colonies, starting with the Gold Coast in 1956,
7
was celebrated as having served to “cut the ground from under the feet of the
Communists” and to have “robbed Communists of the familiar imperialist argument.”71
The Narrative
This study seeks to distinguish between nation/nationalism as a category of practice and
nation/nationalism as a category of analysis and to treat terms such as “nation,”
“nationalism,” “ethnicity,” “identity,” etc., more as categories of social and political
practice, i.e., categories of everyday social experience, as distinguished from experiencedistant categories.72
As a category of practice and of everyday social experience, nation/nationalism
has shifted from its association with the Enlightenment/French tradition, linked to notions
of popular sovereignty and citizenship, to a more reactionary and virulent form in the
nineteenth and twentieth century, linked in the twentieth century to Nazism and fascism
and other movements of the radical right. In the last decades of the twentieth century and
beginning of the twenty first century, it has been associated, especially in post-Soviet
societies and in the non-Western and post-colonial societies, for example, with
degenerate practices such as “ethnic cleansing.”73 The wars and conflicts in the former
Yugoslavia republic, the conflicts between Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo, the war
among Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi in East Central Africa, and the crises in
the Darfur region of Sudan in North Central Africa, etc., for example, have been framed
and encoded in those terms.
As a category of analysis, the narrative of nationalism has moved from the
original idealist and organic conception of the nation, associated with Herder74 and the
German romanticist nationalist school in the eighteenth century, to a political or
voluntarist conception associated with the French revolution and the Enlightenment, and
to the modernist and fairly recent dominant view of the nation as culturally constituted
and the redefining of national community through culture rather than place of birth.75 In
the literature of this phenomenon, nationalism has moved from structural and materialist
analyses to an approach stressing the meanings and effects of a ‘sense of nationality’ and
the intimate connections between personhood and belonging to a nation.76 In yet more
8
recent times, attempts at more complex analysis of the phenomenon have involved the
application of different perspectives, including the perspective of citizenship, and of
fields not normally associated with the study of the nation. For example, Roger
Brubaker, in his fairly recent study, Ethnicity without Groups, has advocated bringing to
bear a set of analytical perspectives, such as cognitive perspectives, which he believes are
not ordinarily associated with the study of, i.e., “ethnicity,” or “nation,” in his attempt to
further the understanding of the categories of “ethnicity,” “nation,” “race,” and to
problematize such categories in new ways.77 He advocates the analysis of such
categories without invoking bounded groups78 and sought to reconceptualize these
categories in a non-groupist manner. 79 He would dispense altogether with the ‘group’ as
an entity as a basic analytical category and would apply groupness as a contextually
fluctuating conceptual variable.80 The reality of race, nationhood, ethnicity, etc., he
commented, does not depend on the existence of “races,” or of “ethnic groups” or
“nations” as substantial groups or entities. He advances groupness as variable and
contingent rather than fixed and given, and as an event that happens or may not happen,
despite the “group-making” efforts of ethnopolitical entrepreneurs.81
The perspective of citizenship is also being advanced by some scholars as an
important category through which the meanings of complex concepts like ethnicity, class,
and gender, concepts associated with the study of nation/nationality, could be more
successfully reconfigured. Kathleen Canning has suggested, for example, that more
complex understanding of both gender and citizenship could be derived by a focus on the
subjectivities of contemporary discourses and constructions of inclusion and exclusion.82
In their recent edited work, Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-Century
Germany, Geoff Eley and Jan Palmowski have suggested that the perspective of
citizenship could provide a new paradigm to understanding not only the history of
Wilhelmine Germany in particular, but also other notions and constructs associated with
the concept of nation/nationality in general.83
This study seeks to reconceptualize the category of the nation and of other
categories and analytical constructs such as class, gender, ethnicity, 84 religion, identity,
etc., all of which, like the category of the nation, are also constructed. As practice
categories, i.e., of social and political practice, the study seeks to apply them in reference
9
to their use by ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, as well as by colonial radicals, to make sense
of themselves or of their activities and of the world around them and as they sought to
persuade people to understand themselves, their interests, and their predicaments in a
certain way, etc. As categories of analysis, the study attempts to apply categories such as
“nations,” “ethnicity,” “class,” etc., in relational and processual terms. 85 Constructs such
as “class” are also applied as time and place-specific construct, rather than as an
unproblematic signifier of identity.86
This study seeks to examine the problem of “nation-forming” in pre-independence
British West Africa and their contingent, fluid, and “event-type” nature. As already
posited in earlier studies, the concept of “Nigeria,” “Sierra Leone,” or “Kenya,” for
example, as “nations” or “nation-states” is indeed of recent origin and is artificial.
Commenting on “nationalism” in Africa within the arbitrary frontiers created by
colonialism, Mazrui had long noted that colonialism created the “Nigerians,”
“Tanganyikas” (Tanzanians), etc., and so they could be argued not to have been
“Nigerians,” “Tanganyikas,” etc.87 What made them so is how they had been constructed
in those terms and predicated largely on colonial administrative cartography of identity.88
And because of their “constructed” nature, this study posits that they are fluid and subject
to reconstitution as evidenced in post-colonial African states’ crises of nationhood and
contestations over citizenship in nearly all these ex-colonies. The Biafran (Ibo)
secessionist war in Nigeria in 1966, less than a decade after independence, more recent
wars and crises in Rwanda and Burundi, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Somalia, the
Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, etc., represent in some different essential ways
attempts to reconstitute the “nation” and redefine citizenship in new ways. Such
imaginative endeavors should be expected to continue as there is nothing sacrosanct
about the inherited borders or the constituent members of many post-colonial African
states.89 The fairly recent creation of Somaliland in 1991 from Somalia is an instance of
such remaking/reconstitution of the nation and notions of citizenship.
This study seeks to examine the emergence of “nationalism” in British West
Africa as a specific ideological and cultural innovation90 in the pre-independence period.
It seeks to inquire into aspects of the framings and narrative encodings of the “nation” in
10
the contrasting discourse and practices of African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs and social
radicals. For purposes of analytical clarity, this study, following my earlier works on the
subject of nationalism, is predicated on the organizing principle of conflict and distinguishes
in the Hrochian tradition between fundamental social antagonism, i.e., socially-relevant
conflicts of interest, and the nationally-relevant conflicts of interest.91 It seeks to
maintain an important focus on culture in its examination of how boundaries of
exclusion, in relation to nationality and citizenship, were being constructed in this period.
Culture helps to reveal how these boundaries were being facilitated in the indeterminate
and fluid contexts where “meanings may be partial because they are in ‘medias re’; and
history may be half-made because it is in the process of being made; and the image of
cultural authority may be ambivalent because it is caught, uncertainly, in the act of
composing its powerful image.” Culture, i.e., the manner in which people communicated
in the broadest sense in modern societies,92 and everyday “ethnicity,” also serve to reveal
how ordinary people, the “crowded people,” were reordering their lives.93 Conflict, the
organizing principle on which the study is predicated, helps to reflect the conflicts of
interest among the various colonial social forces, including their daily struggles over the
details of life in space and time, from the continuum of residential space to the workplace
and to the market place. The study seeks to reveal how conflicts generated, in part, from
the changing socio-economic conditions and processes under colonialism in this period,
i.e., socially-relevant conflicts of interest, intersected with “nationally-relevant” conflicts
of interests. It seeks to show how African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs went to the people
and sought to discursively reconstitute local conflicts which originated in the sphere of,
i.e., economic life, religion, kinship, relations between age and sex categories, etc, into
conflicts carried on in the name of the “community” or of the “nation.”94 Their
endeavors involved combining materials that provided potential community, or
groupness, such as language, religion, and culture, into a larger collectivity. Eley and
Suny have remarked that most successful nationalisms presume some prior community of
territory, language, or culture (the objective basis) which provide the raw materials for
the intellectual project of nationality (i.e., the subjective basis, linked to political
intervention, new ideologies, and cultural change).95
11
This study seeks to examine contradictions and ambiguities, the coexistence of
stasis and change, etc., in its examination of the nationalist phenomenon in British West
African colonial social formations in its attempt to provide further understanding of this
phenomenon. It seeks to point to multiple pathways of mobilization, with their
ambiguities and contradictions, and the pathways not taken.96 In the attempt to analyze
contradictions, focus is also maintained on context and action, i.e., the context in which
local actors had available to them more than one set of social interpretations and which
they employed as appropriate, such as their use of tradition.97 This facilitates the analysis
of contradictory attitudes, positions, and discourses, and the complex contexts in which
African politicians, in particular the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, went about the project
of the “nation.” The perspective of citizenship also affords some insights into the
analysis of contradictions and of stasis and change. As Geoff Eley and Jan Palmowski
have commented, such a perspective could provide a new paradigm that encompasses
notions that otherwise seem contradictory, such as the continued importance of the
locality and the nation; the evolving relationship between the private and the public
spheres; and the coexistence of stasis and change.98
Hitherto mainstream studies of nationalism in colonial Africa have tended to
simplify the otherwise complex phenomenon of nationalism and the idea of nationalism
in these contradictory and ambiguous contexts.99 This had been due in part to their
failure to problematize nationalism100 and to move its analysis from the realm of
politics, 101 the ground on which the category of the nation was first proposed, to the
terrain of culture where it was elaborated and in which it is best conceived as a complex,
uneven, and unpredictable process. A few of these earlier studies, such as Coleman’s
(1958), were more sociologically based but suffered from certain teleology. 102 A few
other earlier studies such as Richard Joseph’s work on the Cameroun (1977), Kanogo’s
on East Africa (1987), and Richard Sklar’s on Nigeria (1963), deviated from the hitherto
conventional paradigm.103
In general, there had been two main schools of interpretation of the nationalist
phenomenon in African studies with notable degrees of variations between them. One
tradition, associated with James Coleman,104 is that which interpreted nationalism to
involve the movement among Western educated colonial Africans for the takeover of the
12
state. In this interpretation, the development of “nationalism” is assumed rather than its
being seen, for example, as a phenomenon formed in the complex political contestations
for power and over identities and meanings. The western educated Africans - the
enterprising intellectuals105 - as well as wealthy commercial class, did play important
roles in the project of “nation-forming” in Africa but they are to be conceptualized as
part of the social forces and the roles they played to be historicized and analyzed, as this
study attempts to do.106 The other hitherto school of nationalism in Africa, the anticolonial school of which Thomas Hodgkin is representative and to which belonged
African historians such as Adu Boahen, for example, interpreted and collapsed different
forms of anti-colonialism into “nationalism.”107 While rightly observing that the
definition of “African nationalism” presents great difficulties, Thomas Hodgkin offered
what he called a broad definition of the term “nationalist” to describe:
Any organization or group that explicitly asserts the rights,
claims and aspirations of a given African society (from the
level of the language group to that of 'Pan-Africa') in
opposition to European authority, whatever its institutional
form and objectives.108
This study is premised on the view that the phenomenon of nationalism in colonial West
Africa was rooted in complex social processes and related to other kinds of politics with
which it was constantly articulating. 109
There is no doubt that defining nationalism is problematic. It is long-agreed
among scholars of nationalism that the term embraces so many dissimilar meanings and
that the very concept is muddled. Hutchinson and Smith had earlier remarked that
“perhaps the central difficulty in the study of nations and nationalism has been the
problem of finding adequate and agreed definitions of the key concepts, nation and
nationalism.”110 Alter, another expert on nationalism, stated that “the plethora of
phenomena which may be subsumed under the term ‘nationalism’ suggests that it is one
of the most ambiguous concepts in the present-day vocabulary of political and analytical
thought.”111 Hence Brubaker, for example, more recently advocated the need to dispense
with the category of the “nation” altogether in collective “group” terms.112 More recent
studies on the subject of nationalism in Africa have also attempted to move the
understanding of this subject and of decolonization in Africa further.113
13
The Problem
The problem of understanding the phenomenon of nationalism in Africa had been tied in
important ways to: 1) the problem of hitherto methodology and epistemology, what had
also been the dominant analytical perspective in Africa’s nationalist studies and what
Chatterjee had called the “problematic” and the problem of the “thematic”;114 it has also
involved the problem of its analysis in the social sciences in general, and 2) the general
problematic of political development, i.e., aspects of what Nairn referred to as the
“nationalism-producing” dilemma.115
The Methodological and Epistemological Problem
As indicated above, hitherto mainstream studies of the nationalist phenomenon in
pre-independence Africa have tended to treat the processes of the period mainly as
intellectual rather than as part of a complex social, as well as cultural, phenomenon and
had abstracted from the social base. This is reminiscent also of the intellectual tradition
in the historiography of nationalism in Western society, pioneered by Carlton Hayes and
Hans Kohn. Important as this tradition was in helping to move the subject of nationalism
and thinking about nations and nationality beyond the “organic" conception of the nation,
it did not facilitate a contextual analysis and social history of the subject.
In the 60s, a few studies among Western scholars of nationalism provided certain
critical entry into possible new theoretical framework within which studies of this
phenomenon could be carried out more successfully. The process of deconstructing
nationalism and moving it from a primordialist, essentialist notion of the nation and tying
it to the social base and to the more currently dominant view of the nation as invented
began in Western European studies in the 60s with modernization theorists, i.e., Elie
Kedourie (1960), Ernest Gellner (1964), and communication theorists, Karl Deutsch
(1953), etc. Kedourie116 contended that nation/nationalism was historically and
sociologically contingent, Gellner117 that it was historically contingent, and Deutsch118
drew attention to nationalism's rootedness in social processes which he characterized as
14
processes of industrializing societies. However, Deutsch failed to integrate the subjective
forces and elements such as the social, linguistic, and cultural experiences of individuals
and groups within and without the social group that mediate and shape what he regarded
to be the objective social processes in such ways that these otherwise objective social
processes become in themselves problematic and unpredictable.119
In the early 80s, Benedict Anderson's work, Imagined Communities, represented a
significant intervention in scholarly works in the study of nationalism. Anderson (1983;
repr. 1991) contends that nationality was culturally constituted.120 As Eley and Suny
commented, these new schools connected the emergence of nationalism (and by
implication, of the nation) to the rise of the modern. Culture replaced structure because
of the necessity of complex communication in modern society. Identity is conceived to
derive more from culture, than from one’s place in a given relatively fixed structure.
Works on the public sphere formation served to redescribe the processes of social
communication postulated by Deutsch and concretized by Hroch and established the
centrality of cultural publics to the project of nation-building.121 Marxists’
reconceptualization of nationalism also furthered the understanding of this subject and
provided major breakthroughs in helping to materialize and historicize the narrative of
nationalism. Hobsbawm’s and Ranger’s “invention of tradition”122 and Anderson’s
evocation of ‘imagined communities’ helped to move the discussion beyond material and
structural determination into the realm of discourse and the generation of meaning.123
The historiography of nationalism in non-Western societies, particularly in
colonial and post-colonial societies, have benefited from the contributions of these newer
schools while newer studies from non-Western societies have also afforded valuable
perspectives from the “margins” to enrich the study of this subject. The growing field of
cultural studies in the last couple of decades have also been serving to fill two important
missing dimensions in “modernist” approaches to the study of nationalism, viz., the
lessons provided from the “margins” and the gendered dimension of the nation.
Until more recent times, however, Africa’s nationalist historiography had suffered
from the uncritical adoption of western paradigms, with its inherent challenges for the
proper understanding of non-Western societies. The problem of understanding the
nationalist phenomenon in Africa has thus also been related to the problem of
15
epistemology. Works in African and subaltern studies in recent times have sought to
provide better analytical insights in these fields by attempting to redefine in the light of
the realities of these societies certain concepts and methodological approaches. For
example, analytical concepts such as gender are being redefined in more robust terms as
to what it means to be a woman or a man in certain African context.124 Some question
whether it should be assumed that social relations in African societies and/or in all
societies are organized around biological sex differences, or if the male body in African
societies can be seen as normative and therefore a conduit for the exercise of power.
Other works by scholars such as Mudimbe (1988), 125 Mazrui (2002),126 etc., are serving
to explore and to come to a better understanding of the whole idea of Africanity or
Africanness in general. Mudimbe, long concerned with this dilemma in African studies,
searched for an African “gnosis,” i.e., African knowledge system, to guide practices and
127
understanding.
The problem of the hitherto dominant analytical perspective in Africa's nationalist
studies is indicative of what had also been a larger problem and inherent “crisis” in
Africanist studies in general and in Africanist nationalist historiography in particular.128
This has had to do, on the one hand, with the implicit and explicit influence of Western
intellectual and political heritage on Africa and in African studies, as earlier stated. In
the post-World War II period, this took the form of revisionist theories of liberal
democracy crafted by a generation of Western political scientist and codified in Political
Development and Modernization theories.129 These were ideological in intent, providing
scientific rationalization of the status quo or, rather, a particular vision of change. As
Gendzier pointed out, it was in this climate (also Cold War climate) that nationalism as a
field of enquiry emerged in intimate symbiosis with the rise of independence movements
in Africa.130 Remarkably, the intellectual hold of this tradition had been so strong in
Africa that even when in the 60s and 70s African historians self-explicitly embarked on
the project of writing “our” history, they were implicitly still saddled with the burden of
the “other” history and tradition to which they had hitherto been socialized and schooled.
Temu and Swai, remarking on this dilemma, have stated that “Africanist historiography
was constituted as an ideological response to colonial historiography,” and that in this
16
encounter “it also remained trapped, thereby making it a negative mirror image of liberal
historiography.”131
Africa's nationalist studies had notably reflected this paradox.132 This is
epitomized in the various schools of nationalist historiography that emerged, from the
Dar Es Salaam school to the Nairobi, Ibadan, and Makerere school, for example.
Notably, the interpretations of politics and society in the Political Development and
Modernization theories which came to govern the understanding of colonial/Third World
societies had implied at the onset a conservative response to the problems of democracy
and mass societies in Western societies from which they originated.133 As Gendzier
noted, the development of this school of thought, like those that followed it, was closely
linked to prevailing forms of domination and cultural hegemony and to forms of
resistance against it.134 Partha Chatterjee has also detailed out in his excellent work how
the Western rationalist epistemological framework had involved a field of discourse in
which power was inscribed.135
A problem of deconstruction, “the unlearning” of “the inherent dominative
mode”136 had thus been posed in my works and is also posed in this study, centered
around the whole issue of knowledge and of power. One is in relation to what became
mainstream discourses of self determination and of the ‘nation’ among colonials,
especially among ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, carried out also within a Western
liberal/rationalist thought system with its given attributes of modernity. In the colonial
social formations under study in the immediate pre-independence period, this applied
structure of thought set an a priori boundary to the discourses that ensued, giving space to
some – the master-discourse of African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs - while closing off
others – i.e., colonial social radicals’ supplementary-discourse. In the late 40s and early
50s era of constitutional changes in British West Africa, the space that was opening up
allowed for the discourse of change and of the ‘nation’ as constituted within Western
liberal paradigms, while closing off space to the discourse of change and of the nation
and notions of citizenship in terms that were more autochthonous, more inclusive, and
socially transforming. It has raised the question in my works of the limits posed by this
choice in pre-independence “nation-forming” and construction of community and
citizenship and the terms in which independence was won in these African states. In
17
regard to hitherto Africa’s nationalist studies, it had also affected the choice of analytical
categories and paradigms.
In the 90s, Partha Chatterjee addressed this problem of epistemology and made a
significant contribution to the discourse of the nation/nationalism from a non-Western
perspective. His celebrated and classic work, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial
World,137 provided quite an important theoretical intervention in the period in nationalist
studies in general and in colonial nationalisms in particular.138 Chatterjee was able to
move Anderson’s celebrated text on the discourse of nationalism further, especially for
the study of nationalism in non-Western societies, by examining the impulses from the
margins in his attempt to theorize on the authenticity or otherwise of the discourse of
nationalism from the 'margins.’ Benedict Anderson's work, Imagined Communities, was
salutary in the 80s in reconceptualizing the way in which people became able to
reimagine the boundaries of their worlds. It remains celebrated as the emblematic text in
marking the moment of transition in the literature of nationalism from structural and
materialist analyses of nationalism to an approach stressing the meanings and effects of a
‘sense of nationality’ and the intimate connections between personhood and belonging to
a nation. However, although Anderson successfully posed the ideological creation of the
nation as a central problem in the study of national movements, he did not quite succeed
in the 80s in breaking with the old western liberal rationalist tradition and the unilinear
conception of historical development that had been so central to bourgeois ideology. 139
To Anderson's concept of “imagined communities,” Chatterjee posed a counter
question and developing concept, “whose imagined communities?”140 Chatterjee
criticized the liberal/rationalist position in failing to pose the issue of the lack of
autonomy of nationalist discourse as a theoretical problem. In fact, he said, the
liberal/conservative bourgeois rationalist thought is unable to pose the theoretical
problem differently. In his critique of the lack of autonomy and of the inherent
contradictoriness of nationalist discourse, Chatterjee aptly contended that this discourse
puts forward certain proposition about society and politics whose meaning is fully
governed by the rules of the language of post-Enlightenment rational thought within
which they were couched. He wrote that nationalist texts are meaningful only when read
in terms of the rules of that larger framework of thought and he took issue with the idea
18
of development, modernization, and of progress in both rational-liberal and Marxist
tradition.141
Other works on nationalism, such as Miroslav Hroch’s work on Eastern European
societies, have also served to advance the understanding of the phenomenon of
nationalism from the “margins.” Hroch’s comparative and materialist methodology
established a socio-historical approach to nationalist movements and their uneven spread.
It explicitly related the process of nation-forming to larger processes of social
transformation, specifically those associated with the global, European wide penetration
of the unevenly expanding capitalist mode of production.142 His basic distinction
between the dominant or “large” nations, i.e., England, France, etc, and the “small”
nations which he investigated in his book and whose independence could only be secured
against the emerging domination of a foreign, metropolitan, bourgeois-aristocratic
coalition have some resonance also for the study of the phenomenon of nationalism in
colonial Africa.143
The Problematic of Political Development
The problem of “nationalism” in colonial Africa is also tied to the wider
problematic of social change, to the way colonial capital and colonial bureaucracy
penetrated these African societies in uneven, contradictory, and incomplete ways. Tom
Nairn, following Gellner, referring to the uneven diffusion of industrialization in Europe
had termed it the “nationalism-producing dilemma”144 In this regard, Nairn named the
nation the “modern janus,” i.e., that the uneven development of capitalism inscribes both
progression and regression, political rationality and irrationality in the very genetic code
of the nation, and that “in this sense, it is an exact (not a rhetorical) statement about
nationalism to say that it is by nature ambivalent.”145
In Africa, colonial intervention – colonial capital and bureaucracy - impacted the
process of historical formation and change146 as well as the divisions and contestations
within and between communities in complex and contradictory ways. Colonial capital
and colonial administration both affected the status quo ante without transforming it. 147
In local African societies, the ambivalence and contradictions were both predicated
19
largely on the forms in which capital sought to articulate with pre-capitalist African
social structures and systems of production as well as the ways in which the colonial
powers sought to reinvent African societies.148
The problem of “nationalism” posed in this study arose, in part, in these
contradictory contexts149 hence the engagement in this study and in my earlier works
with the theme of contradictions and ambiguities in relation to the nationalist
phenomenon. My study of colonial social conflicts and of the political and cultural
contestations of community and notions of citizenship and over rights and entitlements in
the last two decades of colonial rule has represented a beginning attempt to try to
understand the nature of such conflicts and contestations in those conflictual and
contradictory contexts.150
This study, as with my earlier my earlier works on the phenomenon of
nationalism in British West Africa, seeks to map out a different terrain, not just
conceptually, but also in terms of the texts or narrative. The study does not seek to
resolve all the issues it raised and some lines of enquiry are followed in greater detail
than others.151 It is hoped, for example, to explore more fully in subsequent works the
possibilities and limits of the concept of citizenship in relation to how individuals across
the board sought to identify themselves in the period under study as well as in
contemporary African societies. My works, including this study, represent beginning
attempts from early in the 80s and 90s to point to new ways of thinking about the
phenomenon of nationalism and of the end of empire in this West African region.
Radicalism and Communism
In my attempt to reconstitute the narrative of nationalism in colonial British West Africa
in this period, important focus is maintained also on the themes of radicalism and
communism in this study and in my earlier works because of the valuable insights they
provide. The category of the radical, as with the other ideological categories applied in
my examination of the subject of nationalism in the West African colonial social
formations, is also posited to be problematic, as indicated earlier. But the category of the
radical remains enduring in my study, however, because of the fresh insights it provides
20
into how other people were imagining the future, as well as the insights it provides into
the process that ended empire. The association of radicalism and colonial radicals with
communism in British official mind is regarded in this study as of importance in how and
when empire ended in West Africa. Thus, my engagement with the nationalist
phenomenon had also involved at the very onset an engagement also with the idea of
communism and radicalism in ways that have not been previously explored or adequately
focused on in the literature of the events and processes of this period in these places.
Strategic “native” intellectuals like the Islamic radicals, Mallam Ringim, Mallam
Lawan Dambazair, and Muda Spikin in the North of Nigeria, labor socialist-oriented
trade union leaders like Wallace Johnson of Sierra Leone, and Pobee Biney and Anthony
Woode of the Gold Coast, and feminists like Hajiyya Sawaba and Funlayo Ransome-Kuti
in Nigeria, for example, are examined in my earlier works and in this study as offering
glimpses of possible alternative conception of the “nation” and of citizenship from a
radical perspective. British officialdom at different times would go as far as labeling
them as “communist.” Many of the colonial social radicals, though also a complex and
shifting category, stood at the critical gateway between various social forces152 of whom
they were a part. They symbolized part of a larger process in colonial society in which
the largely rural as well as urban social forces sought to renegotiate the terms of their
incorporation in colonial society and to reorder their lives “in the course of an
extraordinary rapid and confusing expansion of their lives.”153 This was especially the
case in the era of rapid constitutional changes and openings of the late 40s and early 50s
when it was perceived to be possible. But the openings were for certain categories of
colonials and certain kinds of discourses that British officialdom would have privileged.
In the late 40s and 50s, British officialdom was also closing the boundaries of legitimate
discourse – the discourse of the nation in mutually-inclusive terms as a new kind of
community based on citizenship conceived of as a kind of “fraternity of equals” and a
“deep horizontal comradeship”– the discourse of colonial social radicals that officialdom
would rather not have centered.
21
Chapter 2
Ethnopolitical Entrepreneurs and the Making of Community
Introduction
This chapter seeks to examine the subjectivities of the discourse and practice of
“community” in the interwar period and the local context in which this was occurring,
including aspects of the contradictory developments in social structures and social
relations. It seeks to examine the shifting political boundaries and how people, in
particular the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, were positioning themselves vis-à-vis the
community, and the coordinates that determined their formulation of rights and
belongings. It begins to explore the use that African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs were
making of categories of, i.e., “community,” “class,” “gender,” “race,” “religion,” in their
social and political practices. It seeks to begin to contend with their practices and
framings, such as their use of vernaculars in their duality that defined the in and out,154
their framings of community aimed at increasing levels of groupness but which were
predicated on more narrow forms of political and cultural address, their appeal to
tradition, and their discourse of the past, i.e., “the ways of our forefathers,” or “the way
things used to be,”155 etc., in static, idealized and ambiguous terms. The study questions
why and to what effects.
African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs would invent a common social identity that
were defined by such polarities or binaries as “race,” “nationality,” “religion,” etc., but
which conceals the differences among citizenry. In this enterprise, old forms of social
identities or collectivities based on prior idealized community were invested with new
meanings and old instruments of social mobilization were applied in changing
circumstances to realize new goals and new interests, and to formulate rights and
belongings. Tradition also became an important ideological substructure of “nationforming” and an instrument of social engineering. Like the British reinvention of
22
tradition to foster legitimacy in their African colonies,156 African ethnopolitical
entrepreneurs also got busy in their social and political practices modernizing tradition
and subverting it in the process of its reinvention.157 The colonial chiefs who formed an
important component of this social force were busy particularly in the interwar period,
modernizing tradition in their own self interest, using the new leverage that the British
had afforded them vis-à-vis their subjects to formulate new rights and duties, demanding
from them obligations in the name of tradition and carrying on practices whose rules and
forms had changed. 158
In exploring the subjectivities of the discourse and construction of community
among African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, this chapter seeks to begin to reveal the
actualities of social fragmentation, class divisions, gender and ethnic exclusions, and
hierarchies, and relations of power in their discourses and social and political practices.
Some social movements in the interwar period are examined as case-studies in this
chapter to reveal how community was being constructed among the ethnopolitical
entrepreneurs and to what effect in these social movements. This chapter also points to
the objective developments towards mutually-inclusive categories and of community
conceived in more embracing terms denoting full rights and belongings but which were
being undermined in the subjectivities of the discourse and construction of community.
Contradictions and Ambiguities
The discourse and construction of community and citizenship in the terms in which
African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs were constituting them were in part shaped by and
further shaping the inherent contradictions in African social structures and in internal
social relations. These contradictions were related in part to the uneven penetration of
colonial capital and colonial bureaucracy. This chapter seeks to focus on certain aspects
of these contradictory developments to reveal how African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs
were maneuvering them and manipulating the complex sets of relationship in which
people were involved in their own perceived interest as they went about the business of
creating “community.”
23
The contradictions in African colonial society had involved, in part, developments
in those structures and systems on which social control had previously been effected in
African societies such as the kinship and lineage systems, again also always in the
process of becoming, as well as in the nature of emergent social forces. For example,
while on the one hand the kinship structure prevalent in most African societies and based
on the authority of elders or on age factors came under assault especially under the
Indirect Rule system,159 on the other hand, the structure was also being reasserted within
and without structures of Indirect Rule.160 Also, while the lineage system which had been
most important in sustaining social structures in many of these African societies both as a
source of recruitment and as a cognitive element was beginning to come under assault, as
Apter had noted,161 for example, it was also being strengthened in other instances as in
areas of cocoa production.162 Colonial capital penetrated or incorporated a system of
social relations and communal “identities” which, though not fixed as also always in the
process of becoming, retained great vitality. In many places, capital did not formally
subsume labor.163 Bernstein’s work on the Hausas in Northern Nigeria, for example,
revealed how individualized household production was incorporated in the circuit of
capital and subjected to its domination without the direct organization of production by
capital and without the socialization of production.164 Thus, in many places, especially
where cash crop farming was introduced, a contradictory development was occurring in
which new social relations of production and attitudes were occurring within prior social
organization of production,165 with important implications for local politics and the
formulation of rights and duties. Earlier studies, such as the well-written account of
David Apter,166 for example, had long noted the undermining of these erstwhile
indigenous structures in the colonial period. Thomas Hodgkin’s study167 also provided
an early and valuable account of the growth of emergent social groups/ forces and
organizations in the African colonies. However, they did not adequately show or explore
how these structures and emergent social forces were developing in complex and
contradictory ways and the effects of these contradictions on the process of
“community-making” or their relationship to collective identification and individual
subjectivities. This study seeks to explore aspects of these developments.
24
Ambiguous Categories
It is noted in this study that while new social forces168 were developing in this period
(alongside the newly created group of colonial chiefs) these were not crystallized on a
particular social axis. Certain economic categories, like the peasantry and the worker, for
example, were emerging in this period but with peculiar characteristics of their own. In
the case of workers, for example, while they may be developing certain identities based
on workplace experience, it is also noted that they continued to share relational
characteristics with other incipient colonial social forces. African “farmers,” “peasants,”
“workers,” “capitalists” or “bourgeoisies,” and other such socio-economic categories
have indeed been debated as problematic categories.169 Going by what had been the
conventional definition of the terms, there were, for example, wage earners who looked
like workers but were more than and less than workers, farmers who looked like peasants
but were more than and less than peasants, and prosperous commercial Africans who
looked like capitalists but were more than and less than capitalists.170 Because of this
state of indeterminacy, scholars have long debated the appropriateness or otherwise of
applying these terms which had been developed in the experience of other regions of the
world to conditions and categories/social forces in the African societies or of other such
societies in which capitalism took on certain peculiar forms and where it was also tied to
the phenomenon of imperialism.171 What is important for this study is to be able to
historicize these categories and to seek an understanding of the particular forms in which
they manifested in particular societies and periods and to what effects, especially in
regard to the architectures and/or reconstitution of community in the period under study.
Also important was the emergence among the incipient social forces of a new
range of perceived criteria centering around newly created roles alongside older notions
and values. Traditional solidarity units based on kinship or age, for example, such as the
age grading societies, were being undermined but not destroyed.172 New agencies of
solidarity and new patterns of role definition based on education, i.e., literary societies,
labor, cooperative associations,173 trade unions, burial societies and political youth
movements, for example, were also developing, as Hodgkin had shown,.174 But they
were arising from the womb of many older units of solidarity which, though changing,
25
still retained certain significance even while their institutional forms may be changing.175
This incomplete socialization and crystallization into particular forms and the given state
of indeterminacy facilitated, on the one hand, the subjective construction of community
and citizenship while it simultaneously predisposed to objective development of National
Societies on the other hand.
Given these conditions of fluidity and contradictoriness, the application of
analytical categories such as class poses a problem. For example, while there was
considerable differentiation going on, especially in areas of agricultural production, no
particular interest group was able to fully crystallize into a “class” or “group.” On the
other hand, one could at the same time detect the growth of a new social force or an
incipient “class” formation, for example, with the growth of western-educated Africans,
or with the rise of wealthy or successful farmers. The latter were able to employ the
labor of others who for various reasons were not so fortunate. In the Gold Coast, for
example, rich farmers/chiefs acted as money lenders to poor peasants who offered their
labor and crops (for sale) to the lenders.176 But the process of stratification and
differentiation here in the agricultural sector as elsewhere in these colonial social
formations was being mediated by other and complex sets of relationship that people
were involved in which undermined a more propitious development on “class” lines.
Nevertheless, “class” element was involved in the exclusionary terms in which the
discourse of community was being privileged among certain colonial social forces. This
is better exemplified and analyzed when the category of class is conceptualized in
processual and relational terms and applied as coordinates of other analytical categories
such as community, i.e., class and community, as this study attempts to do. The social
movements examined in this chapter in the interwar period, such as the Benin Water Rate
Movement (1937-41) in Nigeria and the Gold Coast Cocoa Movements in 1930-31 and in
1937-38,177 are explored as case studies of the ways in which “class” interest was being
advanced in the resolution of conflicts of interest otherwise predicated on community
interest. The application of the analytical categories of community and class as
coordinates serve to better facilitate this examination. They serve to exemplify the
diffused and subjective terms in which community and citizenship were being defined in
the interwar period, to resonate in more salient ways in the post-World War II period.
26
The social movements examined reveal how more narrowly-based interests were being
fought for in the name of “community,” involving, for example, the manipulation of other
cross-cutting ties and the complex sets of relationship that people were involved in.178
There was, however, also objective development of community in mutuallyinclusive terms, as noted above. The contradictions and diffused nature of colonial social
structures and social relations also predisposed, objectively, towards the potential
creation of National Societies. The next section examines in brief the beginning
developments towards mutually-inclusive categories, i.e., National Societies, as well as
how these were being undermined in the ideological creation of “community” and/or the
“nation” by ethnopolitical entrepreneurs.
Developing National Societies
One could detect from this period onwards, at another level of examination, objective
developments towards the creation of mutually-inclusive categories, especially in the
cities. New communities of interest were being generated in the cities that cut across
prior existing cultures or categories of religion, language, or ethnicity, etc. Shared social
and cultural space, the continuum of geographical space among the employed and
unemployed, etc., provided certain elements of commonalities and potential new
communities of interest among various social forces. Happy hour gatherings in beer
parlors, alcohol drinking in bars, new language of social discourse such as pidgin
English,179 annual festivals, the streets, cinema houses, etc., provided new sites for the
construction and dissemination of popular culture and discourse and new arenas of
socialization that bonded people of different backgrounds in the cities. This objective
development towards the creation of community in mutually-inclusive terms in the cities
is well exemplified in the case of workers and is examined a little further in the following
section.
27
The West African Colonial Worker and the Development of Mutually-inclusive
Categories
Workers’ shared social and geographical space with others such as the mass of the
peasantries, the unemployed, and other colonial social forces was serving to create new
communities of interest that went beyond the hidden abode of production from the
interwar period onwards.180 One notes, for example, that when workers went on strike, it
was not just workers who took to the street, but hordes of others, i.e., laborers, urban
poor, unemployed, i.e., “verandah boys” in the Gold Coast, discharged veterans, and the
whole community, many of whom were not directly tied to the abode of production.181 In
one of the notable strikes among workers in the interwar period, i.e., the 1919 Freetown
strikes and riots in Sierra Leone, the whole community became involved,182 as will be
repeated in other instances and periods in this and other colonies as well. When workers
went on strike they also took with them not just the community but also causes that
issued beyond the workplace.183 The strike in Freetown in 1919 by workers occurred
mainly among daily wage workers against the felt hardship of the post-World War I
inflationary trend. But they were supported by others – artisans, laborers, the urban poor,
the unemployed, etc., who all joined in the strike and went on rampage and for various
other causes.184 Abdullah commented in his examination of these strikes that the strikes
and subsequent riots were also very much the product of the interaction between workers
and the unemployed, most of whom were discharged carrier corps members, migrants
from the Freetown hinterland, as well as Sierra Leonean “Sea boys” who had been
repatriated as a result of racial disturbances in Liverpool and Cardiff, England.185
Certain developments did seem to suggest some growth along worker
consciousness,186 such as their attempts to advance their perceived interests in the
workplace ranging from overt direct actions such as strikes to more subtle and hidden
forms such as absenteeism and restricted output. Also, wage earners had in many places
taken early initiatives to organize on trade lines and in unions in defense of their
perceived collective interests.187 There were also some attempts made to forge the
colonial worker into a “class” to advance its interests in the workplace and later, in the
40s, in the colonial state. In the immediate post-World War II period, serious attempts
28
were made by labor socialist-oriented trade union leaders in Nigeria and in the Gold
Coast to consolidate the workers in these places into a “class” by seeking to create
workers’ political party to fight for workers’ interests.188 But the colonial worker
continued to share relational features with the peasantries and other incipient colonial
forces at the same time as they were developing some identity based on workplace
experience, with significant political implications.
In spite of the many features and activities that typified developments towards
some kind of groupness among workers the colonial worker in the West African colonial
social formations under study did not form or become a crystallized social category nor
always acted so. In fact, the lines of fractionalization and differentiation continued to be
evident among workers even when and where sustained attempts were made to unite
them to fight in their own perceived interest. Internally, they did not even form a
monolithic group and were divided vertically and horizontally.189 Except perhaps for the
radical fringe, the history of West African colonial workers was one of constant
fractionalization.190 In my interview with Michael Imoudu,191 the radical labor activist
and railway union leader who came into prominence in the famous Nigerian General
Strike among railway workers in 1945, he lamented the divisions among workers which
he said continued till date in Nigeria.192 In the colonial period, the closest to the
development of the worker in British West Africa as a distinct category was with very
select groups such as the Sekondi Takoradi cluster of railway workers in the Gold Coast.
They also became politically significant, notably, in their militancy and in the resultant
British colonial administration’s fear of this category of workers as sources of communist
infiltration into the colonies.193 The Sekondi-Takoradi railway and harbor workers were
also the only group of Gold Coast wage earners to have established union organization on
a durable footing prior to the beginning of World War II in the Gold Coast and they were
also the most prone to militant action.194 Their sustained militancy fed official fear of
them as sources of communism in the colonies.195
In general, the multiple locations and connectedness of workers with others
outside their workplace, among other factors, mediated in the development of worker
consciousness196 and served, at another level of observation, to foster the development of
community in inclusive terms among workers and other colonial social forces. However,
29
such propitious developments became undermined,197 in part, in the construction of
community by ethnopolitical entrepreneurs. Such divisiveness was increasingly
actualized in the last decades of British colonial rule in West Africa as African political
entrepreneurs and cultural producers went about talking and acting on behalf of the
“nation.”
In Nigeria, for example, the National Societies that were developing in the
Azikiwe-led National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC)198 party in the
1940s became undermined and “ethnicized” in the political competition between the
NCNC and the Yoruba-based Egbe Omo Oduduwa (Egbe) which was later transformed
into the Action Group (AG) political party and was headed by Obafemi Awolowo. In
this political competition, the NCNC became discursively framed in narrower terms as an
“Ibo-dominated” party by Azikiwe’s political rivals – Awolowo and the Action Group
party, and later, the party of the Mallams, the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) in the
North.199 Subsequent Nigeria’s new Federalist Constitutions of 1951 and 1953 which
legitimized the regions as the basis of Nigeria’s unity served to legitimize this discourse
and political practice. Based on these new constitutions, access to power at the national
level was seen to be more readily attainable by control of the regional power base. While
regionalism itself could be functional, the use that ethnopolitical entrepreneurs made of it
in Nigeria and Sierra Leone in which this was introduced was largely dysfunctional. As
the AG and the NPC quickly moved to gain control of their own regional base – the
Yorubas in the West and the Hausa-Fulanis in the North – they discursively constituted
other regional parties in exclusionary terms as the “outsiders,” out to subjugate the people
in their own region of control.200 This was in their efforts to consolidate their power base
and to keep rival political parties out of their region. As Azikiwe and more mainstream
members of the NCNC succumbed to focusing on gaining power in what had become
NCNC’s regional base in the Ibo majority-composed Eastern Nigeria,201 the erstwhile
developing unity of workers and of other social forces in the NCNC became increasingly
undermined. Workers’ affiliation with the NCNC party became largely determined by
their region of origin and while Ibo workers remained in the NCNC, Yoruba workers left
the NCNC en-masse to join the Yoruba-based AG party in response to Yoruba
“nationality” patriotic appeals by the AG leadership.202 In the North of Nigeria, the NPC
30
political party also discursively constituted the Yoruba and Ibo workers in the North and
who formed the bulk of the Northern administrative support system as oppressive and
dispossessors and were associated with the rival Yoruba-based AG party and the Ibobased NCNC party. They were discursively linked with Christianity, labeled by the NPC
and their Northern followers as the religion of “infidels.” In this way, the Northern rulers
that composed the NPC party fairly succeeded in drawing a wedge, to their advantage,
between Moslem Northern workers and populace and workers from the East and West of
Nigeria residing in Northern Nigeria. The 1966 pogrom in the North of Nigeria in which
hundreds of Ibos residing in the North were massacred by Northerners was the most
virulent manifestation of the use of categories of, i.e., “ethnicity,” “religion,” in such
divisive and mutually-exclusive terms. The resultant Nigerian Civil War of 1966-70 –
the Biafran War - in which the Ibos tried to secede and to carve out a state of their own
(Biafra) was a direct result of this pogrom, and in the long-term, of “nation-forming”
premised on mutually-exclusive categories.203
Community and the Socially-Relevant Conflicts of Interest
This section begins to explore the socially relevant interventions of colonials through the
examination of some select social movements to reveal the forms204 in which
architectures of community and identities of interest were being created from the preWorld War II period onwards. It examines aspects of the contestations among certain
colonial social forces over rights and duties, disputations over law, etc., and their
relationship to collective identifications & individual subjectivities.
The inter-war period witnessed a variety of social activism and struggles in local
African society. The struggles were reflective of conflicts of interests among Africans as
well as against colonial capital and the colonial bureaucracy, including against Africans
with vested interest in the colonial state, such as the colonial chiefs. Part of the root of
conflicts in the local arena was structured specifically in the changes being effected in
gender relations, in relationships between generations, in the colonialists' restructuring of
communal and chiefly jurisdictional boundaries and status, and in the changing structure
of power and production in these societies, etc. The conflicts were also tied to
31
differences in access to sources of wealth and power. In these conflicts and struggles,
issues of power, class, democracy, gender, community, and others intersected and
interconnected in varieties of ways to produce different dynamic. Also, interests
converged and diverged in such ways that some issues or interests became displaced in
the perceived realization of others. The sites of struggle also varied, occurring at the
level of the community, at the level of production, etc.205 In many cases, a variety of
issues were equally interwoven in a particular struggle that it may be difficult for the
casual observer to gain any critical entry into the understanding of what was being fought
over or prosecuted.
In these struggles, issues and coalition of forces were constituted and
reconstituted many times for the realization of certain perceived goals and interests. In
this state of indeterminacy and fluidity, certain interests were realized while others
became displaced. More privileged Africans, such as the colonial chiefs, used their
vantage location in both the colonial state and in colonial society to advance many of the
movements in which they were involved in their perceived interest while discursively
constituting the movements in terms of community interest.206 Also, men organized
against the ease and frequency with which women were initiating and getting divorce
from the courts and sought to make the colonial power curtail the burgeoning autonomy
women were developing in marital relationships.207 In these conflicts and struggles, old
and new aspirant power elites sought to reconstitute community by reaching for a
historical and an idealized past, obscuring the inherent divisions and inequities between
them and others.
Class and Community
A major discursive component of many local struggles that were waged in this period
was community but more particular and narrower interests were involved. Although
“class” elements appeared subsumed in the collective context in which these struggles
were waged, closer examination reveals that, though muted, “class” was an important
determinant of action. More adequate analysis of these “community” movements is
facilitated when class and community are used as coordinates. In these social
32
movements, vertical lines of division were discursively blurred and other interests
marginalized as colonials with capacity and ability made internal shifts at different
moments as consistent with their perceived interests while simultaneously constituting
the discourse or conflicts ostensibly in terms of the realization of wider, community
goals. Some of the select social movements examined below also reveal how community
was being discursively constituted in relation to differences vis-à-vis others, i.e.,
differences of race, i.e., “we,” the Benin Community, against the “aliens who were
allowed an indefinite period of monopoly of Timber Areas,”208 i.e., the European
merchants, or the foreign cocoa merchants in the Gold Coast who were causing
“widespread alarm … throughout the agricultural districts’ by their monopoly
practices.”209
In the Water Rate Controversy Movement in Benin City, Nigeria, 1936-40, and
the Cocoa Hold-Up Movement in the Gold Coast in 1930-31 & 1937-38, the Benin
community and the farmers in the Gold Coast, respectively, were discursively constituted
as if homogenous and united in opposition to the foreign merchants in Benin, Nigeria,
and in the Gold Coast. But this homogeneity or consensus was more apparent than real.
When examined in closer detail, one discerns narrower interests being advanced as much
against the foreign merchants as against other members of the community within the
coalitions though the movements might have been constituted in terms of communitywide interest. Inherent lines of differences and divisions reveal vested interests within
the coalitions, such as those of the landlords in Benin City, or of the larger farmers in the
Gold Coast, among whom were the colonial chiefs, that belied the appearance of
community-wide interest or unity.210
In the Benin Movement, for example, while the colonial government was willing
to ameliorate the cause of the grievances brought before them in the “community-wide”
petition by seeking to reduce the amount of the proposed tax based on tenement and
against which the Benin Movement initially arose, the Benin landlords who composed a
vocal segment of the petitioners declined to take the offer. They rather insisted on a flat
rate which would reduce the cost to them by spreading the cost to all members of the
community, including non-homeowners and those who may not be able to pay for it.
They argued that the payment of Water Rate based upon “tenement” rendered their
33
houses insecure and that “the Flat rate system is fairer because it is more distributive.”211
But home owners were the ones benefiting from the installation of the water system,
either directly or indirectly by providing competitive rent price.212
The Gold Coast Cocoa Movements reveal similarly divergent interests. They
were also prosecuted in terms of community-wide interest although the occasion for it –
the fall in cocoa export prices, especially in the mid-1930s - affected mostly large-scale
farmers and other wealthy cocoa traders and brokers among whom were the colonial
chiefs who were also the principal organizers of the movements. Other cocoa farmers
who were least affected by the fall in prices were forced into participation by the colonial
chiefs under threats of reprisals if they failed to join in. Chiefs through the Native
Authorities system, i.e., the Native Tribunals and Native Police, enforced the traditional
rights of oath-taking and gong-gong proclamations in order to secure compliance. Chiefs
in Native Authorities used their power to arrest and heavily fine cocoa brokers, laborers,
and poor farmers who were seen to have violated the traditional oaths or gong-gong
prohibitions against the sale of cocoa and purchase of imported goods.213 These actions
were to ensure the success of their cause, whether or not the interest of the rest of the
farmers or of the community was as much involved. Once the interest of these large
farmers and wealthy traders and brokers was realized, or failed to be realized, they
abandoned the movement which then dissipated and brought no gains to the
community.214 The 1937-38 Cocoa Movement not only failed but also brought reprisals
against the community by the colonial administration. These cases and other select social
movements examined in this and subsequent chapters reveal the ways in which certain
interests were being advanced and legitimized over others in the construction of
community especially by African political entrepreneurs and cultural producers.
As these movements developed, relationships, ideas, interests and values were
discursively constituted and reconstituted in the light of perceived interests. Language
and action shaped and reshaped each other in quite unpredictable and dialectical ways. In
the case of the Benin Water Rate Controversy Movement in Nigeria which is examined in
more detail here and below as a good case study, the language of discourse moved back
and forth from “we,” i.e., the community, versus “them,” the colonial officials and/or the
foreign companies, to “we,” the non-privileged Benin natives versus “them,” the
34
privileged colonial chiefs and their clientele, the wealthy landlords, and/or the Westerneducated members of the community. It was typified by a more narrowly defined
discourse and action based on the interest of the wealthy members of the Benin
community, the western educated Africans, and the landlords, at different moments.215
The Benin Community Movement was based on a complex array of issues and
was at the onset constituted ostensibly as a community movement centered on apparent
community issues. The water rate grievance provided an immediate and focal point for
all disenchanted members of the Benin community to vent their grievances and it
appeared to have brought the community together initially. However, as the movement
continued, more particular and divergent interests surfaced and the language of discourse
and patterns of alliances became continually subject to reconstitution. In this movement,
sides changed quite often in line with perceived and redefined interests. Disaffected
chiefs who had joined forces with the western educated elements in the initial struggle
against the colonial government and the colonial chief were abandoned by the
westernized elements as the interest of the latter became redefined in the light of certain
administrative changes being introduced in the course of the struggle and which were
perceived to be favoring them. These changes led the Western-educated members of the
Benin Community to re-align themselves with the colonial chief, the Oba, against whom
they had initially organized. The westernized elements soon shifted their position again
later on to organize against the colonial chief, this time with the support of the Nigerian
Youth Movement (NYM) which had waded into the struggle at a later stage.216 The
loyalist chiefs who had initially sided with the Oba of Benin, the colonial chief, at the
beginning of the struggle also turned against him in the course of the struggle after they
found themselves displaced in the 1940 administrative reorganization that was
undertaken by the colonial administration in partial response to the on-going movement's
demands.217 They would now accuse the Oba of not governing according to “custom and
tradition,” some of the same accusation earlier levied against the Oba by the opposition
movement and against which they had stood in support of the Oba at the time.218
“Custom” and “tradition” became defined and redefined to serve particular interest at
different moments in time!
35
In these struggles, categories of class, gender, nationality, etc., were being made
into “community” as conceived by different social forces at different times. This would
also be the case in other instances and places in this period and in the post-World War II
period. The cases examined briefly below, such as the Okeiho-Iseyin struggle in Western
Nigeria, or the anti-tax movement in the Gold Coast in 1931, also reveal such practices in
the interwar period. In these cases, the struggle against the erosion of old privileges and
power positions or the struggles of would-be male power holders, etc., were undertaken
and discursively constituted also in terms of “community” struggle. In many of these
struggles and/or movements, elements of class, power, gender, and community
intersected in quite complex and contradictory ways. This study seeks to unmask the
inherent divisions and inequities that underlay the “community” and/or the “nation” that
ethnopolitical entrepreneurs in particular were constituting in otherwise homogenous and
undivided terms in their discourses and practices.
Although many local struggles in the colonial period took on “community” and/or
“group” forms, their real causes were indeed much more sectional and multifaceted, and
the dynamics much more complex. In the Iseyin/Okeiho risings of 1916 in Western
Nigeria, issues of power and control were intertwined with other more popular issues, as
would tend to be the case in many other instances in this period and in the post-World
War II period. The local chiefs who were major participants in this movement had their
personal concerns, involving their resentment against the new reduction in their power
and influence under colonial administration. The Native Court System introduced in
1914 had served to reduce the leverage which these chiefs formerly had over local affairs.
Non-chiefs resented the new Western legal codes applied in the interpretation of cases.
The rank and file expressed resentment against forced labor and changes in community
health procedures, etc. 219 Western-educated Africans, who in their own case felt
alienated from the structures of power, were struggling to gain control of some of the
power positions and resources of the colonial state. Colonial administrative restructuring
in the interwar period had not only negatively affected the position of many of the old
power elites, it also served to alienate large sections of the growing new Western
educated Africans who it mostly left out of the institutions of power. The latter sought to
advance their claims against both the colonial power and the colonial chiefs. Their
36
struggle was facilitated in some cases through alliance with other alienated groups,
principally disaffected chiefs (mainly sub-chiefs), in waging what were usually sectional
struggles but carried on in the name of the community.
The Gold Coast also provides ample examples of these developments. In the late
interwar period in this colony, for example, chiefs whose status became diminished as a
result of the then on-going native administration changes and sections of alienated
Western-educated Africans joined together and mobilized community against colonial
chiefs and other colonial officials alike, transforming their grievances into community
grievances. In this particular colony, local opposition to the colonial government and to
pro-government chiefs was developed, partly under the auspices of the Aboriginal Rights
Protection Society (ARPS), in three crucial areas of Native Administration policy there:
the Provincial Councils, Stool Treasuries, and Native Tribunals.220 In his study of rural
politics in South-Central Gold Coast (Ghana), Stone reveals how, in 1939, local
opposition to the Native Treasuries Bill enacted that year was mobilized by a section of
the Western-educated Africans led by Kobina Sekyi and the rump of the ARPS who were
also nursing resentment against the new role of chiefs and the reduction of their own
influence.221 They had encouraged in this movement the formation and activities of antigovernment parties within the states, providing legal and political advice to further local
propaganda against instruments of interventionist Indirect Rule such as the Provincial
Councils and the Stool Treasury System. Nana Amanfi III, the Omanhene of Asebu and
the president of the Central Provincial Council, complaining against the ARPS’
agitational activities and pamphleteering, observed that “they first touch the states in
which they know discontent exists or where relations between the chiefs and a section of
his people are strained.”222 Resentment of dispossessed chiefs, especially, provided
fertile grounds for local actions against colonial chiefs and for alliances with other
alienated groups against both the colonial chiefs and the colonial authority. Nana Amanfi
III in his complaint against the activities of Sekyi and the ARPS remarked that agitational
leaflets are “taken to the chiefs who in the opinion of the society are at variance with the
Paramount Chiefs.”223
Similar developments were occurring in other places and colonies. The Benin
Community Movement in Nigeria in the latter half of the 1930s exemplifies many of the
37
issues raised above in regard to the ways in which architectures of community or
groupness were being created around more narrowly-based interests and is examined in
further detail in the following section.
The Benin Water Rate Agitation Movement, 1937-1941
In Nigeria, disaffected western educated Africans and sub-chiefs in Benin - political
entrepreneurs and cultural producers - mobilized the community for a struggle fought,
ostensibly, over the Benin water rate levy in 1937 as a community struggle. The struggle,
however, incorporated other aims and interests some of which were mutually conflicting
and competing. In this struggle, interests and identities were constructed and
reconstructed as the struggle developed and alliances remained shifting in the realization
of certain perceived interests.224 The ostensible common cause or the immediate cause
over which the struggle was waged was the government's proposed levy of 10% on
annual value of tenements on the people.225 The petitioners had initially written to the
Chief Commissioner, Southern Provinces, claiming to be speaking on behalf of the whole
community, that:
The community desires to invite Your Honor's special
attention to the fact that in matters of public interest and
concern the opinion of the community must be consulted
before submission.226
They subsequently organized through the auspices of the Western-educated members of
the Benin community and chiefs into a powerful body, the “Benin Community,” to
express their discontent against this law and to attempt to right their many felt grievances.
The movement indeed seemed all-encompassing and community-based as it
involved a cross-section of the Benin City community and various interest groups, from
the Iyase (Prime Minister)227 who took up leadership of the movement, to other
traditional chiefs, and to the Western-educated members of the community, the
commercial class, farmers, as well as artisans all of who formed the bulk of the tax
paying adult population.228 The issue over which the struggle ensued ostensibly cut
across groups but it only provided a focal point for fighting out other pent-up grievances
and personal discontents, however. Underlying it was the disenchantment of many of the
38
aggrieved parties with the Benin Native Administration system as then constituted by the
colonial government which was also felt to undermine many old privileges. The
Western- educated elements who were also left out of power felt the new arrangement
gave too much power to the colonial chief and they promoted a discourse constituted
around the perceived unrepresentativeness of the Benin administration of which the Oba,
the colonial chief, was a part.
The water rate issue thus provided an occasion for fighting out more fundamental
grievances the nature of some of which mutually conflicted internally. While, at one
level, community-related causes brought members of the Benin community together, at
other levels, individual or “class” interest was undermining and fractionalizing the
collective build-up. For example, the petitioners had complained, in the interest of the
“community,” that they perceived the formation of the new Forest Reserves by the
government as serving only the interests of European merchants, particularly those of the
United African Company (UAC) operative in that area. In the petition to the Chief
Commissioner, they had made it known to him that “it is not the desire of the community
that the new Forest Reserves should be formed,”229 and claimed that “the community sees
no vision in undertaking a profitless labor for the sole benefit of aliens who are allowed
an indefinite period of monopoly of (their) Timber Areas.”230 The economic resources of
the “community” were to be protected from the “outsiders” – the White merchants and
the foreign monopolies. However, sections of these same petitioners – wealthy members
of the community, i.e., the landlords, etc., - who claimed to be speaking for the people
would also seek to protect their interests over those of the people – other members of the
Benin community. They would ask that the government introduce the Flat Rate system
in regard to payment of the water rate levy in Benin City instead of payment on tenement
basis as approved by the government. They wrote: “Your Petitioners' request is for
payment of the Flat Rate system and its adoption, and not a reduction based on
Tenements.”231 This was to take care of the interest of these landlords to whom the
tenement rate would only have accrued. The Flat Rate reduced the amount for them as it
spreads the cost to everyone and not just to homeowners. But homeowners were the ones
benefiting from the installation of the water system, as earlier indicated, either directly or
indirectly by providing competitive rent price. Even when the government showed a
39
willingness to reduce the total due amount by 6%, still based on Tenement, these
petitioners refused, insisting on the flat rate. They wrote that:
Although a reduction to 6% of the Tenement rates brings
the required amount from 1,442 (pounds) to about 800
(pounds)232 only, Your petitioners prefer to pay the full
1,442 (pounds) by the Flat Rate system instead of … by
Tenement.233
They insisted that 'the flat rate system is fairer as it is more distributive and
impartial as well.'234 The government, however, rejected the flat rate proposal for many
reasons. Among these was the belief, rightly, that the collection of the flat rate would be
difficult and political officers were also of the view that people outside Benin City should
not be compelled to pay for amenities enjoyed by the city dwellers alone and that a flat
rate tended to penalize the poor more than the rich. The landlords engaged in the Benin
Movement, on the other hand, did not feel compelled to consider the effects of the Flat
Rate system that they were insistent on recommending on the ordinary and nonprivileged Benin community members.
In this movement, another interest group, the traditional chiefs, dispossessed of
their erstwhile income and power as district heads in the on-going administrative
reorganization of the provinces and of central administration,235 took action to redress
their felt grievances. To redress this in ways desired by these chiefs, i.e., go back to
“traditional” arrangements, would of course constrain against the aims of the Westerneducated elements who were seeking representation in the new administrative structures
and could make more undemocratic a system the latter already criticized as
unrepresentative and undemocratic. The western educated elements had resented their
exclusion from positions of authority and the large powers enjoyed by the Oba as Sole
Native Authority, aided by a council selected on the basis of alleged traditional titleholders. They also sought in the Water Rate struggle a reform of the Sole Native
Authority system along what they perceived to be more democratic and progressive lines.
The wealthy Benin natives as well as the Benin chiefs also took action in the same
movement to express their felt pent-up grievances against the Oba and the British Native
Administration for the law enacted in November 1937 which restricted their free access
to village land, contrary to the free practices in pre-colonial period. Now, the permanent
40
crop rule enacted stipulated that permission had to be obtained first from the village
councils which then sent this to the Oba for scrutiny. This usually involved delays and
some arbitrariness in the decision as to who eventually got what.
Interests were not, however, as clearly defined or positions fixed. As noted earlier,
they were shaped and reshaped in the course of the struggle. Even the colonial
administration also reconstituted its discourse of what was representative and shifted its
position to accommodate other groups by undertaking some administrative reorganization
in the course of the movement, a step forced on them by the resoluteness of the
participants of the struggle. British colonial officials had thought at the beginning of the
struggle, in their usual manner, that the crisis would simply disappear. Even the colonial
chief, who had similarly thought so, had to quickly change his strategy and went as far as
employing a lawyer for his defense when he realized the seriousness and permanence of
the movement. 236
At the early stage of the struggle, the Western-educated elements and sections of
disaffected chiefs could be found in alliance against the Oba, the Sole Native Authority,
on the one side and on the other side, those chiefs who remained loyal to the Oba in
support of him. But even in these alliances, there were already ideological lines of
friction and the coalition would not be sustained. The falling apart began in March 1938,
subsequent to the public meeting at the Benin Native Court between the Assistant District
Officer, H. F. Marshall, the Iyase, and other Benin chiefs and representative members of
the Benin Community. A committee of six had been elected at that time by the Benin
Community to produce an Intelligence Report in regard to proposed lines of
administrative reforms for Benin. All the six elected members happened also to be
Western-educated Benin natives who were engaged in different occupations.237 In their
report, they had emphasized, among other things, that in due course literacy and
intelligence should be the primary qualifications for membership of the Benin Native
Administration. Although they were correct in emphasizing, as they did in their report,
the need for democratizing the base of government and in condemning the appointment
of councilors mainly on the basis of title, they were wrong in unduly equating literacy
and intelligence with Western education, thus eliminating other potentially capable
individuals who may not be Western-educated. Their report obviously had a partisan and
41
self-interested slant to it and caused reaction among the other members of the
Community with whom they were in alliance, particularly the disaffected chiefs. Many
of the dispossessed chiefs with whom they had been in alliance became strongly opposed
to the Benin Community Intelligence Report238 and subsequently reorganized themselves
into a new constituent group, the “Ekhaekpen Chiefs of Benin.” They went on to argue
that in the reorganization of the Benin Native Administration, “titles should not be wiped
out or discouraged nor looked upon with scorn.”239 They further emphasized, appealing
to tradition, that, in accordance with the stated policy of reorganization “the good old
principles and customs” should be maintained.240
The new reorganization that was carried out by the government, however,
favored the young, more Western-educated elements than the chiefs altogether whose
position became more precarious because of the selection criteria basis for getting any
members of this group into the Benin Council. It served to crystallize the latent
antagonism between the old traditional ruling elites, including the “loyalist” chiefs who
were now also becoming displaced in the new reorganization, on the one hand, and the
younger, Western-educated elements, on the other hand, if only temporary.
The struggle in Benin was a long drawn-out process and continued even after the
1938 reorganization and when the water rate controversy was no longer an important
issue. Barely a year after the reorganization, positions, interests and discourses began to
change again. The small but “loyal” and influential group of chiefs who had supported
the Oba previously when the agitation had been centered on the water rate issue now
turned against the Oba because of their own recent displacement from office as a result of
the latest administrative reorganization. These changes, however, still secured firmly the
base of power of the Oba even while new elements were being given more adequate
representation. The newly displaced “loyalist” chiefs now accused the Oba of assuming
privileges not conferred on him by “custom!” In an outburst of anger, one of the leading
chiefs asked the District Officer whether the British were in Benin solely for the benefit
of the Oba or whether they were there for the chiefs and people as well!241
In alliance with the Oba at this time was the reconstituted members of the Benin
Community, composed mostly of the western educated elements, who came out in
defense of the Oba! One of the younger elements, Uwaifo, called the displaced chiefs
42
“reform grumblers in Benin” and who were merely self-seekers. Igbafe’s remark in
regard to the movement's new configuration to the effect that “it looked like a reversal of
alliance,”242 is an understatement of the changing dynamics of this movement and of the
fortunes of its participants! It was indeed a reversal of alliances!! But even this reversal
would be subject to further reversals and shifts a year later with the involvement of the
Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM) which again introduced new dynamics into the
movement.
The NYM, originating in Lagos among western-educated Southerners was geared,
among other things, towards the reform or abolition of the Indirect Rule system. Among
its strongest members were also the group of young, vocal, Western-educated elements
who formed part of the Benin Community. The assistant secretary of the Benin
Community, Mr. E. E. Omere, was, for instance, also the leader of the local branch of the
NYM.243 With the active involvement of the NYM at this time, the support of the
Western-educated members for the Oba changed again as these once more reconstituted
themselves into an opposition against the Oba and joined forces with the alienated chiefs.
The grievances against the Oba at this point mainly concerned the chiefs and titled
classes exclusively, many of whose grievances had arisen directly or indirectly out of the
reorganization of the Benin Division which had excluded them and for which the
government and not the Oba was responsible. But the grievance resolutions passed on
December 28, 1940 and January 11, 1941 had the support not only of this group but also
of the whole Benin City community, including the democratically-inclined elements who,
as Igbafe also observed, “a short while previously were hot and strong as champions of
the people against the titled chiefs.”244 He also recalled that in the earlier Intelligence
Report on Benin City written during the water rate agitation, the Benin Community had
been opposed to many members of the titled classes being ex-officio members of the
Central Council. He said representation of these titled chiefs at all had been due to the
Oba and the political officers245 and concluded, despairingly, that “the alliance of these
strange bed-fellows early in 1940 was the more baffling when the antagonism between
the two groups in 1939 is borne in mind,” and again remarked that “it was a reversal of
roles.”246
43
It definitely does not seem rational that the Benin Community, especially the
young western-educated elements, would find common cause with the chiefs again.
However, their repositioning was strategic and was now tied into the politics of the NYM
which was geared towards eroding the base of power of the colonial chiefs, the Obas, in
the Indirect Rule System. The alliance of the western-educated members of the Benin
Community, who now controlled the Benin Community, with the disaffected chiefs was
to strengthen their goal of eroding the power of the Oba of Benin. At this point, sectional
struggles at the community/local level were beginning to be tied into the politics
predicated on goals and interests that transcended local issues even while these formed
important elements of it.247 Socially-relevant conflicts of interest would begin to be
discursively constituted into nationally-relevant conflicts of interest increasingly as these
Western-educated Africans, including wealthy commercial class, etc, embarked on the
project of the “nation-forming” especially in the post-World War II period.248
In the Benin Movement, the politics of the Western-educated elements ensured
the resolution of the conflict and its contradictions more in their favor in the short-term
during the interwar period. They succeeded in forcing the hands of the administration to
effect more changes along more democratic lines in the Benin administration in the early
1940s. An Executive Council was established on April 22, 1941 made up of all groups,
chiefs as well as non-chiefs. Its function was to advise the Oba on all measures before
these became promulgated into law by the Native Administration. It served to reduce to
some extent the concentration of power in the Oba.
The Gold Coast Cocoa Movements, 1930-31/1937-38
The Gold Coast Cocoa Movements of 1930-31 and 1937-38 are also examined further
below as important case studies of social struggles discursively constituted in terms of
community interest but in which narrower “class” interests were being fostered.249
Different aspects of these movements have been the subject of some previous and wellwritten studies250 and it is not the intent of this study to go over the details of these cocoa
Hold-Up Movements. The Movements are examined in this chapter in the light of part of
this study’s aim of revealing the forms in which “community” was being constituted
44
especially in the discourse and practices of ethnopolitical entrepreneurs from the interwar
period onwards. These involved ways that served some interests while other interests
were marginalized.
The 1930-1931 and 1937-1938 Cocoa Movements in the Gold Coast were
principally organized and advanced as community action by the colonial chiefs, along
with other wealthy cocoa traders and cocoa brokers251 for whom the then fall in prices
spelt economic doom, especially after 1937.252 The colonial chiefs, in their role as large
farmers, had put their political weight behind the movements and were in fact the first to
take action. Before the first hold-up movement began, the Central Provincial Council of
Chiefs had passed a resolution early in 1929 in which they drew the government's
attention to:
The present widespread alarm that the action of cocoa
merchants in this country is causing throughout
the agricultural districts by the very low prices
paid for cocoa, contrary to the assurances that
from time to time have been held out to farmers
by the officers of the Agricultural Department.253
But the Hold-Up Movements were more complex and the interests involved more
narrowly-based among Africans than simple community action based on the interest of
cocoa farmers254 in general as self-interested participants tried to discursively constitute it
and to prosecute it as such. Although, as already noted in previous works, the Cocoa
Hold-up Movements in the Gold Coast involved a wide cross-section of colonials,
particularly those involved with the cocoa trade, not all members of the cocoa growing
community stood to gain from, or willingly participated in it. Contrary to how the large
cocoa farmers, especially the colonial chiefs, would seek to constitute it, the cocoagrowing community was not homogenous. The interests and positions of the new
economic groups that arose around the cocoa trade were highly differentiated in terms of
their relative dependence on this trade. Large scale farmers, some of whom were the
chiefs and including many migrant cocoa farmers, wealthy urban-based traders, and
cocoa brokers who participated in the movement had stronger ties with the market forces
and with the international market relations and were thus more hard-hit by the cyclical
change in producer prices than the smaller-scale farmers and cocoa brokers. The latter
45
were partially still subsistence farmers with weak ties to the market and their livelihood
was therefore less dependent on the cash-based economy. Because of their relatively
small dependence on the market place and on market forces therefore, they tended to stay
relatively aloof from farmers’ political protests. Some small farmers had indeed
participated in the hold-up when it was perceived to be in their interest, as in the case of
small farmers in the Central Province, as Twumasi reveals. 255 But there were many other
places where there was substantial opposition to the hold-up largely among small cocoa
brokers and small farmers. Force had therefore to be applied on them to participate.
The chiefly and wealthy commercial class tried to use their vantage position and
relative influence in colonial society to mobilize mass support and to prosecute the
movement as a community movement, irrespective of the lack of community-wide
consensus over it. At the start of the Cocoa Hold-Up Movement, the colonial chiefs not
only used their traditional and legislative and judicial powers to advance the cause of the
movement but also used these powers to coerce small farmers and others not so badly
affected by the slump to participate by force in the Hold-up in their attempt to ensure its
success. The Kyidomhene of Larteh, for example, swore the traditional oath of Akwapim
that he would see to it that his subjects did not sell their cocoa until the price rose to 25/shillings per load. Wealthy traders and brokers also, under the prompting and with the
active encouragement of colonial chiefs, intimidated dissidents.256 Chiefs through the
Native Authorities system, i.e., the Native Tribunals and Native Police, enforced the
traditional rights of oath-taking in order to secure compliance.257 Gong-gong
proclamations, the pre-colonial forms of gathering the community together on urgent and
crucial community matters, was beaten in towns and villages to enforce participation.
They used their power to arrest and heavily fine cocoa brokers, laborers, and poor
farmers who had violated traditional oaths or gong-gong prohibitions against the sale of
cocoa and purchase of imported goods. Failure to comply was threatened with all forms
of punishment including one year’s imprisonment258 to anyone who bought European
goods or sold cocoa. There was counter-reaction to this enforcement, however, revealing
the lack of consensus and differences in the cocoa community. In rural areas like Kwahu,
where the Asafo organization was strong, organized pressure was put on the chiefs to lift
46
the ban on the sale of cocoa and failure to do so resulted in the destoolment of some
chiefs.259
The colonial chiefs who forced the community into compliance did not, however,
take the community into considerations when they chose to abandon the movements. Not
surprisingly, they did not hesitate to abandon the movement and the cause as soon as they
started to incur the displeasure of the colonial government and perceived that their other
position of power in the state was at stake. Their withdrawal subsequently created
important splits in the leadership of the Hold-Up Movement and contributed to the failure
of the Movement to achieve its objectives. The 1930-31 hold-up movement, for example,
lasted for less than two months, though intense and well-organized, and when it was over,
the price of cocoa was lower than when the hold-up began.260 The Movements also
brought reprisals against the community by the colonial government.
This pattern of political behavior, the potential to fight individual perceived
interest in terms of a “collective” whole or on behalf of the “community” or “nation,”
was to occur again and again throughout the colonies in the interwar period and in the
post-World War II period. This was especially the case among the chiefly and wealthy
class as well as among the Western-educated and professional elements – the cultural
producers and political entrepreneurs – as well as others all of whom at different times
sought to enlist mass support.261
It is therefore helpful to inquire into the coincidence of class and community,
class and ethnicity, i.e., “ethnoclass,” and class and nationality, etc., for example, in the
discourses and practices of the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs and their construction of
“community” and/or the “nation.”262 It is clear that “class” and “national” interests can
and do coincide.263 As revealed in this study in the case of certain aspirant African
political incumbents, it is also clear that “class” aspirations can and do in certain
situations also take dominance over “nationalist” or “community” considerations even
when the rhetoric is “nationalist” or “community.” In his important study of national
revival among the smaller European nations, Miroslav Hroch made the qualitative
distinction of principle between the national movement as part of the process of the
formation of the modern nation and the “national” activities of the Estates (in the case of
this study, the “national” activities of African political entrepreneurs and cultural
47
producers, i.e., African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs).264 It is noted in this study and in
my earlier works that in the “nation-forming” project of African ethnopolitical
entrepreneurs, popular issues and/or socially relevant conflicts of interests were displaced
as they sought to transform these into nationally-relevant conflicts of interest.265 There
was no serious or sustained discussion among them of grassroot-oriented issues or issues
of democracy and popular participation, including issues of grassroot entitlements, in
their imagined new community or “nation.” Those who sought to center these grassroot
issues at the center of national agenda - such as certain colonial social radicals - were
marginalized and delegitimized by both British officialdom and the ethnopolitical
entrepreneurs.
Certain colonial social radicals attempted to resolve socially relevant conflicts of
interests and nationally-relevant conflicts of interests in more popular terms and to make
the categories of, i.e., “ethnicity,” “gender,” “religion,” “class,” “nationality,” etc., into
National Societies in their social and political practices.266 A handful of them, influenced
to some varying degrees by communist and leftwing revolutionary doctrines and
movements, had begun to imagine the “nation” and citizenry in new and socially
transforming ways in the interwar period. They had begun to raise the issue of
democratic change in the colonies as well as the issue of the end of empire as serious and
immediate agenda in the interwar years, as seen in the career of Wallace-Johnson in this
period, for example. I. T A. Wallace-Johnson,267 a socialist-oriented labor leader in
Sierra Leone, had established a West African colony-wide organization, the West African
Youth League (WAYL), first in Sierra Leone in 1935 and in the Gold Coast in 1937, as
the organizational instrument for the realization of these goals. By 1942-43, various
Marxists groups had also developed in West Africa and especially in Lagos, Nigeria, also
in furtherance of similar goals. Many of the leading members of these groups would
eventually go to London as students though not all were committed Marxists and many
would fall foul of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) which tried to patronize
them on arrival in Britain.268 Outside the colonies, discourses of democracy and of selfdetermination in the interwar period were located in the discourses and activities of other
African and Black organizations,269 as well as in the Pan African Movement270 which
included a number of West Africans in Britain. These individuals and organizations were
48
all certainly influenced to varying degrees by leftwing discourse of self-determination
and of the nation in the interwar period.
The contrasting framings of the “nation” in socially radical terms would be
opposed by British officialdom who were beginning to be fearful of such discourses and
developments from the interwar period. The resonance of communism in colonial social
radicals’ discourses was perceived as counter-hegemonic and destabilizing of the status
quo and of officialdom’s imagined community in their West African empire and they
would seek to close the space for such discourses and practices. One way by which
officialdom did so was in the application of labels such as “extremist,” “communist,”
“agitator,” etc., labels that served to delegitimize such “nation-talk” and their proponents,
as well as notions of citizenship in socially transforming terms.
The next chapter examines the making of the category of the “communist” in
British officialdom’s discourse and their imperial anti-communist framework.
49
Chapter 3
British Officialdom and the Making of the Communist
Introduction
This chapter examines aspects of the making of the category of the communist in British
imperial discourse and to what effect. The study posits that by discursively constituting
as “extremist” and “communist” those whose discourses and practices represented
alternative space for the construction of community and discourse of citizenship in more
socially inclusive and progressive terms, British officialdom was serving to delegitimize
and to close the space for the privileging of community and notions of citizenship in
socially transforming terms. This also involved officialdom’s corresponding gradual
legitimization of the discourses that they would rather have centered, located more
among the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, especially after the 1948 Gold Coast conjuncture.
The latter development is examined in chapter four and subsequent chapters. This
chapter seeks to examine, in addition, the real threat of communism, if any, in British
West African colonies and among colonial social radicals in the colonies, including
among West African students in Britain. “Communist” was indeed a label that British
officialdom applied to those holding a wide range of political views. It was applied in
particular to colonial social radicals, critics of government, and anybody that they did not
like.271 As Hakim Adi commented, in the light of British government’s post-World War
II problems, perceived opposition to British plans to strengthen itself economically and
politically in the colonies was also seen as part of the Soviet threat.272
As noted in chapter two, colonial social radicals were already being perceived by
British officialdom as sources of communism in the colonies from the interwar years as
early as the 1920s, in the heyday of the Communist International (Comintern)
movement.273 Colonial social radicals comprising of labor socialist-oriented trade
unionists and union leaders like I. T. A. Wallace Johnson of Sierra Leone, Pobee Biney
50
and Anthony Woode of the Gold Coast, Nduka Eze and Michael Imoudu of Nigeria, and
others, were labeled as “strike agitators” and “communists;” 274 workers’ strikes like the
1919 and 1926 workers’ strikes in Sierra Leone, the various mine workers’ strikes in the
Gold Coast, the later 1945 workers’ strike in Lagos, and the Enugu coal miners’ strike in
1949, etc., were decried by officials as the rioting of “hooligans,” or of the “mob,”275 and
believed by them to be influenced by “extremists” and “communists” and “agitators”276
from outside; the 1948 Gold Coast crisis was characterized by Governor Creasy as the
work of “six evil men,” influenced by communists, referring to Nkrumah and others
accused of complicity in the disturbances;277 otherwise middleclass women radicals that
led grassroot movements for change in the colonies such as Funlayo Ransome
(Anikulapo) Kuti and Constance Cummings-John were labeled as “communist”278 and
their movements as “communist-inspired,” etc.;279 the organization of West African
Students Union (WASU) in Britain were felt to be “under communist influence” and of
“political extremists”;280 popular grassroot movements such as that of the Northern
Elements Progressive Union (NEPU)281 in the North of Nigeria were ridiculed as
“invented political society to fulfill desires of self-aggrandizement by its leaders”282 and
its members as mere “extremist group,”283 etc.
This chapter seeks to examine the actual as opposed to the imagined threat of
communism in British West African colonies and among colonial students overseas and
to show how the British anti-communist grid was beginning to collapse into one the
different socially relevant interventions in the colonies and among colonial students in
Britain. This is partly revealed through a closer examination of the discourses and
activities of two major colonial social forces who, in official mind, were perceived as
potential sources of communist infiltration into the colonies in the interwar period. This
includes an examination of officialdom’s interaction with, and reaction to them. These
were: colonial students overseas284 - those from West Africa represented in Britain in
their main organization, WASU285 - and colonial labor and trade unionists286 with a kind
of labor-socialist orientation, symbolized in the interwar years in the colonies in the
activities of I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson of Sierra Leone. The latter loomed larger than life
in official mind as a source of communist infiltration into their West African colonies and
51
was regarded in various unfavorable terms, including that of an “unscrupulous
professional agitator.”287
The exploration of these themes in this chapter is important because of what this
study considers to be the significance of British officialdom’s fear of communism in their
colonies in the process that ended empire in West Africa and of the terms in which
empire ended in these colonies. A central thesis of this study and of my earlier works on
the theme of radical nationalism in colonial British West Africa is that British
officialdom’s fear of communism in the colonies, real or imagined, was an important
component of official mind and of the dynamic of the process that ended in what this
study considers to be precipitous decolonization in British West Africa. The many
correspondence files of the Colonial Office and Foreign Office in the British national
archive in London reveal officialdom’s intense pre-occupation with communism and their
fear of its potential infiltration into the British colonies especially in the post-World War
II Cold War period, not only in their possessions outside Africa such as in South-East
Asia, but also in Africa, including West Africa. These range from correspondence files
on communist activities in the colonies to their prevention, etc.
There is no doubt that officialdom was fearful of colonial social forces like
colonial students overseas, and in the colonies, trade union organizers with labor-socialist
orientation, workers in strategic industries like the ports and railways, and returning
servicemen and students. They felt the latter would have had contact with prevalent
communist and other leftwing ideas and leftwing individuals while serving or studying
overseas. In the course of the research work I undertook in the British archives, I found
numerous listings in the Colonial Office and Foreign Office files on communism in
regard to these groups in relation to British colonies, including extensive listing in
relation to these groups in British West African colonies. Many of them were marked as
destroyed or detained by the Department of State. These included files such as
“Communism in the Colonies: Communist influence on students in the U.K, 19481949,”288 “Colonial Students in UK: security problems caused by undesirable contacts,
1951-1952,”289 and “Communist Activities in the Colonies, 1948.”290 A few marked as
detained had been released and some are reflected in this study. 291 Although destroyed
or unavailable at particular times, the extensive listing in itself is further indicative of the
52
great pre-occupation of British colonial power with communism in their African and
other colonies as well as of its perceived influence among colonial students overseas.
In regard to West African students, Colonial Office reports contain numerous
signs of alarm at “the addiction of so many of the young West African intelligentsia to
form Communist associations in the UK and the printing of communist articles in the
West African native press.”292 Discussions about solutions to the problem of perceived
communist influence amongst the students took place at the highest level of the Attlee
government involving the Colonial Office, the Commonwealth Relations Office and the
Foreign Office, as well as amongst the Joint Chiefs of Staff and in the Cabinet itself.293
The Development of the Imperial Anti-Communist Grid
In the West African colonies, the fear of communism was already beginning to seriously
engage colonial officials’ attention from the interwar period. The perceptions and
concerns of colonial officials in regard to communist influence in these colonies were
also being conveyed dutifully to the Home Office through official dispatches, political
intelligence summaries, etc., from the 1920s onwards. They reveal colonial officials’
beginning unease at any activism in the colonies that appeared radical or oppositional
and their fear of communist involvement in these, as well as their fear of potential
communist infiltration into these colonies. They were also beginning to collapse all the
different forms of social activism in the colonies that they did not like into one undivided
category of, i.e., “rebellion,” “communist,”294 etc., and were seeking ways to combat
them. For example, early attempts by workers to establish unions295 in response to wage
and working conditions were suspect among colonial officials right from the start. They
were prone to quickly label such incipient workers’ initiatives and activism as rebellious
and their leaders as “agitators” or “communist,” etc. Thus, the 1921 census reports for
the Gold Coast noted the trade guilds in Takoradi to be “under the influence of
agitators.”296 Damachi underscored the troubling nature and negative effect of such
official perceptions and labeling of labor-oriented activism in his study of industrial
relations in Africa. He noted that, at the beginning, African trade union movements and
organizations that arose mainly in response to work conditions and wages turned early as
53
much a reaction to imperial rule as a reaction to working conditions as a result of official
labeling of these movements and strikes as “rebellious.”297 He further remarked that:
As the demand for higher wages or better working
conditions was being regarded as subversive by
the colonial governments, Africans learned the
lesson that a strike was not only an economic but
also a political tool.298
Officialdom’s fear of communist influence in the colonies and the development of
the imperial anti-communist grid dated back to developments in the international arena
consequent to the Communist Revolution of 1917. The period of further consolidation of
empire, the interwar years - 1917-1939 - had also witnessed the birth and growth of the
communist movement and communism’s attempt at proliferation worldwide through the
organ of the Third International, i.e., the Comintern. This also involved plans for
aggressive pursuit of converts in the West’s colonies, regarded as its “weakest links.”299
Plans were indeed made to infiltrate the West’s spheres of influence, specifically their
colonies, in the Sixth Congress at Baku in 1924. The theses adopted in the Fourth World
Congress of the Comintern earlier in 1922, for example, described Blacks as a nationality
oppressed by worldwide imperialist exploitation and who must be liberated through the
extension of communism into these territories/colonies.300 Marxism-Leninism’s
theorizing on capital, imperialism and the colonial question301 sought to provide critical
consciousness and insights into the perceived multiple layers of domination and
oppression to which the Black colonials in particular were believed exposed.302 In this
twin system, the Black masses are seen to be experiencing alienation both as members of
the dispossessed class and of an oppressed race. Specialized bodies such as the League
Against Imperialism (LAI) and the International of Seamen and Harbor Workers (ISHW)
were created to carry out the task of winning the minds and souls of the West’s colonial
subjects, particularly the workers. The LAI was the Comintern’s front organization and
an important and major conduit pipe for the dissemination of leftwing ideas to colonial
subjects of varied ideological leanings.303 Through the LAI, colonials not having had
direct exposure to communism were able to have indirect contact, however fleeting, with
Marxism-Leninism and with leftwing organizations in the West and in the Soviet
Union.304 The LAI also gave support to the West African Students Union (WASU),305 a
54
mainly liberal body in conception, and was in close touch with the Negro Welfare
Association (NWA).306 Reginald Bridgeman and Fenner Brockway in England were
major LAI members who gave considerable support to the WASU in London and also to
select political organizations in the colonies, such as the party of the social radicals in
Northern Nigeria, the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU). The ISHW was
another of the important front organizations of the Comintern established to serve as
sources of revolutionary influence among Blacks and colonial subjects in the interwar
period.307
Official fear of communist influence in the colonies and among African colonial
subjects was also fed in the interwar period by the radicalization of the Pan-African
movement, a transcontinental organization composed of colonial subjects and diasporic
Blacks in Britain.308 Diasporic Africans like W. E. B. Dubois who became recognized as
leader of the Pan-African movement and others like George Padmore309 who had been
influenced by communist ideas and were card carrying Communist Party members at
some stage of their political career facilitated the radicalization of PanAfricanism from within. Through them the movement became affected by the ferment of
leftwing and communist revolutionary ideologies then prevalent and which served to
introduce into it the discourse of immediate radical change and political independence in
the colonies in the interwar period and was renewed in the post-World War II period.
The transition to a decidedly radical political nationalist agenda within the Pan African
movement was only made, however, with the historic Pan African Congress of 1945 in
London.310
The impact of communism was, nevertheless, minimal in the West African
colonies, if at all. Leftwing-leaning Africans were fairly limited in number and were only
strategically engaged with communism. 311 The discourse of the nation and of political
self-determination in leftwing terms in the interwar period tended to resonate more
among the diasporic Blacks and a handful of colonial subjects resident abroad in Britain,
France, and in the United States.312 Diasporic Blacks were more seriously engaged with
communism at certain stages of their career. These included leftwing-oriented Blacks
such as George Padmore, the West Indian who played very active role in the movement
until he resigned from it, Paul Robeson, the African American singer and communist
55
activist, W. E. B. Dubois, an African-American literary figure who became a communist
late in life, Claude MacKay, the revolutionary African American poet, Cheddi Jagan, C.
L. R. James, and others all of who played more prominent roles in leftwing movements
among people of color in the interwar years.
Although perhaps of limited presence and influence in the colonies and among
West Africans, the communist movement and communism’s radical ideas and
programmatic agendas were perceived to be threatening enough by colonial officials to
raise among them the specter of communist infiltration into their colonies even in this
early period and would continue to feed into official fear of communism in their colonies
in the post-World War II period as well. The onset of the Cold War in the post-World
War II period would intensify official concern about communist influence in the colonies.
In the interwar years, as early as the 1920s, the British colonial authorities were already
speculating on the beginning hold of communist influence on their West African subjects
and, fearful of the implication of such, were looking for ways to combat it and would not
leave things to chance. In the colonies, especially in the Gold Coast, local administration
had already begun to get alarmed at the Comintern's perceived influence in these early
years and had also started to take active steps to search for the infiltration of communist
literature into their West African territories. Their fears were further fed by the discovery
of some communist literature already filtering into the colonies. In the Gold Coast, the
then governor, Guggisberg, expressed his fear of the infiltration of communism into the
colonies when The Crusader, a Leninist anti-imperialist publication, was seized by
officials.313 This was believed to have been brought in by colonial seamen. Guggisberg
regarded the publication as “dangerous,” “violently aggressive against the white race,”
and “welcomes the spread of Bolshevism.”314
The next sections examine two major social forces conceived in official mind as
sources of communist infiltration into the colonies in the interwar and immediate postWorld War II period: colonial students overseas and socialist-oriented labor in the
colonies. It seeks to examine the actual influence of communism on them as well as
their actual as opposed to imagined potentials as sources of communism in the colonies.
56
The Overseas Colonial Student
Overseas African students, 315 particularly students in Britain where nearly all overseas
West African students were located in this period,316 were perceived by colonial officials
not only as potential sources of communist infiltration into the colonies but also as
critical groups whose role could make the difference between stability and instability in
the colonies because of their strategic position in relation to their home countries. The
link between African students overseas with events in the colonies was indeed real and
significant, as will be revealed below in the examination of the West African Students
Union (WASU) in London. Also, Hakim Adi noted in his study that communism and
especially Marxist ideology was playing an increasingly important role in the politics of
many of the students in Britain, and that to some extent this influence was spreading to
West Africa.317 But the extent of communist influence on them and its spread to the
colonies through them may not be as officialdom imagined. Lord Milverton, formerly Sir
Arthur Richards, governor of Nigeria in the 40s, disliked WASU’s political activities and
was fully convinced, for example, that WASU was “a communist medium for the contact
of communists with West Africans when they come to this country”318 and suggested an
inquiry into the Union’s activities.
The Colonial Office report produced during 1947 captures officialdom’s longtime concerns about the politics of students and intellectuals which it claimed had upset
Colonial Office’s “calculations and disturbed the even tenor of political developments
among the slow moving masses” in the colonies.319 The report details officialdom’s
concerns and belief that “the whole tenor of political future of the African colonies is
bound up with these few men,” referring to the students and intellectuals, and sought
ways to “counter if possible the extremist political propaganda and atmosphere to which
students are subjected in this country.”320 Committees were set up principally on colonial
students in the United Kingdom to address officialdom’s concerns about potential and
believed actual communist influence on colonial students in Britain.321 The Informal
Group set up by the Colonial Office to investigate the “Political Significance of Colonial
Students in the UK” and the Welfare and Information Departments of the Colonial Office
would continue to discuss what could be done to combat believed communist influence
57
among the students. These would also seek ways to encourage social relations between
Africans students and the ruling class in Britain, as well as how to develop more fully the
use of anti-communist propaganda.322
The potential socialization of colonial students into Western intellectual thought
which could readily facilitate the transmission of leftwing ideas, as well as their
proximity in Britain to communist-front organizations like the LAI and other leftwing
organizations and leftwing socialists in Britain323 were indeed felt to be ominous for the
colonies. Among the sources of perceived communist influence with overseas African
students was the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Colonial officials
regrettably identified the activities of the CPGB among Gold Coast students in Britain
“who are contacted upon arrival and indoctrinated through social contacts.”324 The
CPGB, with its headquarters in King Street, London, and its affiliates in Liverpool and
other ports trading with West Africa, was also reported to carry its activities among
disaffected seamen who “bring funds and literature to West Africa.”325 The WASU was
able to be in touch with the CPGB through their links with Reginald Bridgeman and the
LAI and with the Indian communist MP in Britain, Shapurji Saklatvala. Through these
contacts and WASU’s co-founder and General Secretary, Ladipo Solanke’s friendship
with Jomo Kenyatta, a link was also established with the Profintern’s International Trade
Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUC-NW) which was presided over by the
African-American communist, James Ford. WASU’s cluster leftwing-oriented
organization, the Circle, also functioned as a vehicle for the transmission of the ideas of
the CPGB to WASU.326
To combat the threat of communism among colonial students and others, the
British tried counter-propaganda devices through books and pamphlets, posters and films,
occasional lectures (particularly among students), the setting up of libraries and proestablishment press,327 as well as attempted control of the main organization of West
African Students in Britain, the West African Students Organization (WASU),328 for
example. Because of their fear of communist influence on WASU, the Colonial Office in
Britain also became involved in encouraging the creation of a rival students’ hostel,
Friends House, to that of WASU’s Aggrey House, as breaks to the dominance of
WASU’s influence among West African students in Britain.329 Friends House was
58
managed by students who had split from WASU and who the British perceived to be
more amenable to official influence and control, as opposed to the more independentminded WASU members and its leadership.330 WASU had all along been careful to
maintain its independence from British official control and to retain its links with
leftwing socialists in Britain.
Indeed, about all West African students in Britain from the period 1925-1950
were exposed to socialist/communist ideas331 which to varying degrees became one of
the important intellectual origins of the radical/militant ideas espoused by some of them
on their return to their colonies.332 For example, Aminu Kano, a colonial social radical of
upper class parentage from Northern Nigeria who had gone to study in London for one
year at the Institute of Education, London University in 1946/47, gained considerable
exposure to leftwing ideas and which influenced his radical discourse of community and
citizenship in the Islamic-based Northern Nigeria333 on his return to Nigeria. He is
reported by his biographer to have used his time in London to attend a variety of socialist
group meetings, joined all the socialist groups he could find, and befriended some of the
left-leaning MPs.334 “Socialism was a concept that attracted him,” remarked Feinstein in
his biographical study of Aminu Kano.335 Feinstein further remarked that “the
ideological spectrum was completed when, as a colonial student, he was courted by
another kind of socialist group, the communists, and even met some of the top
leaders.”336
Aminu Kano was soaking up these new ideas while developing his own thoughts
on how to effect change in his society, particularly in the very conservative Northern
Nigeria, his region of birth, on his return to his colony Nigeria. Alan Feinstein
commented that “his head was spinning with all the ideological nuances and variations he
was sopping up, and with his attempts to apply them to Nigeria and Africa,”337 and that:
He … had a strong urge to go back and put into operation
some of the exhilarating new and revolutionary ideas he
had picked up in his year in the outer circle – ideas that
might effect the changes necessary to bring his own land
into the wider orbit of the modern world.338
The influences on Aminu’s thinking were of course wide-ranging, as with many
other colonial radicals. For Aminu Kano, the range included his early learnings from the
59
Koran and the writings of the historic nineteenth century Islamic reformer in the North of
Nigeria, Usman Dan Fodio, and from his mentor in Northern Nigeria, Sa’adu Zungur,339
whose radical but parochial thinking had influenced Aminu Kano long before he traveled
abroad and continued upon his return as well, to the philosophy and political concepts of
early French and American revolutionaries, to Shavian Fabian socialism, to Ghandi’s
nonviolent (satyagraha) concept of struggle from colonial domination, and to socialist
and communist ideas.
Another colonial student in London, Ladoke Akintola,340 who would also later
become prominent in his colony’s political scene, as with many other such ex-overseas
colonial students, was similarly exposed to the range of radical/revolutionary ideas during
his years of study in London as a law student between 1946 to 1949. He was involved in
liberation politics, particularly in WASU, which was founded by a fellow Yoruba
student, Ladipo Solanke in 1925. Through Solanke, Akintola was introduced to George
Padmore of Trinidad, once a card-carrying communist but still imbued with revolutionary
ideas of a Pan Africanist nature,341 Jomo Kenyatta, and also to Kwame Nkrumah.
Akinjide Osuntokun recorded in his valuable biography of Akintola that it was between
1947 and 1949, through his friendship with George Padmore, that Akintola toyed openly
with communism.342
However, in spite of evidence of exposure to, and flirtation with communist ideas
by some colonial students overseas, communism did not become an important tenet or
lasting philosophical underpinnings of their imagined new communities in West Africa.
Aminu Kano, for example, might have become enthralled with his new-found concept of
socialism, but he and the leaders of the militant circle within WASU, the West African
National Secretariat (WANS) to which he was introduced under the aegis of Kwame
Nkrumah, George Padmore, and others, were not thinking of mass movements in
Marxian terms, as Feinstein also recorded.343 His politics on his return home to Northern
Nigeria society, though socially radical and militantly anti-colonial, was not communist.
Akintola, summing up this period in his own life, reflected that “any educated African
who was not a socialist or communist before he was forty was a fool, and any who was a
socialist or communist after forty years was equally a fool.”344 It is not too certain what
Akintola exactly meant by this statement. It could, however, be said to reflect his
60
appreciation of whatever insights communism and the left critique of colonialism
provided in their understanding of the colonial situation at an early stage of their political
socialization and career and the futility of the adoption of Marxian-type politics to the
realities of West Africa. It could also be said to reflect Akintola’s and other African
politicians’ appreciation of the futility of the adoption of Marxian-type politics at an
advanced stage of one’s political and professional career when the cost is higher to them
especially at a time when they were already acquiring political power and wealth.
The following section takes some in-depth look at West African students in Great
Britain through their major organization, the WASU, to see what they were actually
saying and doing.
Revisiting the West African Students Union (WASU)
WASU is being examined a little closer here because of its significance as an
organization that comprised the highest concentration and cross-section of overseas
students from the four British West African colonies and with which the Colonial Office
was in constant interaction. The Colonial Office closely monitored developments within
WASU, along with other organizations such as the Nigerian Union (NU), the Gold Coast
Union (GCU), and the Sierra Leone Students Union (SLSU), but its attention was
concentrated on WASU as the foremost organization of West African students in Britain
from 1925-1958. WASU also represented the primary organ or vehicle through which
West African students in Britain privileged the discourse of an independent West African
nation and sought to influence progressive changes in the West African colonies and in
colonial policy.345 WASU had influenced early at the beginning of the 40s the movement
for constitutional change in the colonies as witnessed among the chiefs and the Western
educated Africans in the Gold Coast colony. Disturbed by what it perceived to be the
relative quiescent political environment in the West African colonies, WASU through its
Secretary-General, Ladipo Solanke, became instrumental in stirring up political
consciousness and activities in West Africa during the war years. Solanke had written to
key individuals in the colonies such as Reverend I. O. Ransome-Kuti,346 Adeyemo
Alakija, Ernest Ikoli, and Nnamdi Azikiwe all of Nigeria, and to Dr. Danquah of the Gold
61
Coast, imploring them to start making political demands. Aspects of WASU’s activities
and discourses are explored to some limited extent347 below, including an examination of
who they were in relationship with, as well as their interaction with the Colonial Office.
This is partly to validate their proclivities towards communism, if any, and the extent of
it, and the possible grounds for officialdom’s concern about these types of students as a
source of communism in the colonies.
WASU’s position, discourses, and relationships with those outside the
organization were varied and complex and spanned many points on the ideological
spectrum. WASU was in complex interaction with the Fabian Colonial Bureau and with
the Colonial Office and its radicalizing initiative was both threatening to, and influential
upon the gradualist approaches of these bodies. At one end of the ideological spectrum,
WASU was in relationship with conservative figures like the colonial chiefs in the West
African colonies, some of whom, like Nana Sir Osei Agyema Prempeh, the Asantehene
of Kumasi in the Gold Coast, were its patrons. Even another colonial Governor of
Nigeria, Sir Bernard Bourdillon (1935-43), who preceded Governor Arthur Richards, also
became one of WASU’s patrons at one time. At the other end of the spectrum, WASU
was in relationship with leftwing-oriented British MPs in Britain like Fenner Brockway,
leftwing-oriented diasporic Blacks like George Padmore and African-American
communists such as Arnold Ward and Paul Robeson, the self-declared, card-carrying
communist African-American singer, and with leftwing organizations such as the CPGB,
etc. WASU went as far as crowning Paul Robeson with a Yoruba traditional title of
Babasale, i.e. patron of WASU, in 1935. WASU’s discourses of self-governing West
African nation-states also ran from Western-liberal to communist leftwing, reflecting the
variety of perspectives of West African students represented in WASU. Among
WASU’s student members also were, at one extreme, sons of colonial chiefs, like
William Ofori Atta, the son of the Gold Coast colonial chief, Nana Sir Ofori Atta, the
Omanhene of Akim Abuakwa, Eastern Provinces, and at the other extreme, radicals like
Kwame Nkrumah and I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson.
WASU, however, revealed itself to be in essence an organization composed
mostly of ideologically moderate students whose main objective was to work with the
government as partners in progress, as seen in its relationship with the Fabian socialists
62
and in its efforts at cooperation with the British colonial government. The West African
Parliamentary Committee (WAPC) established in April 1942 and headed by Reverend R.
Sorenson, a British MP, represented one of such endeavors. The WAPC was comprised
of other members of the British Parliament, some members of the Fabian Society,
officers of WASU, and others interested in the affairs of West Africa. It sought to
coordinate its activities with those of national organizations in the West African colonies
such as the Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM), the Gold Coast Youth Conference
(GCYC), the Sierra Leone Youth League (SLYL), and similar ones in the Gambia.348 If
WASU had any ideology at all, it was diffused. WASU could be described as centrist
and at best eclectic as its membership and patrons revealed.
WASU’s noted shift towards radicalism in the mid-40s was strategic and
originated more clearly in its disappointment with its erstwhile ally, the Fabian Colonial
Bureau, who comprised an important constituency of the Labor Party when it came to
power in 1945. Before 1945, WASU was established more towards the center, but its
disappointment with the Labor Party when it came into power in Britain in 1945 led
WASU to take a more radical posture and to experience a tactical shift to the left of
center as the voices of its more radical members became prominent. They demanded
more radical and rapid changes in the colonies that WASU had believed its Fabian
socialist friends in the Labor Party had been in agreement with. Their dissatisfaction
with the Labor government and the subsequent leftward shift in their politics contributed
to the increasingly prevalent view in official circles that the students had become
contaminated by communism and this further strained relations between them and the
Colonial Office.
However, from its inception in 1925 till 1945, before the Labor Party came into
power, WASU and its discourses could be perceived to be more moderate. Also, though
it was not without its share of internal dissensions which predisposed to factions within
WASU, i.e., split leading to the British-sponsored Friends’ House, there was some
appreciable degree of consensus among WASU members. Their discourses centered on
the need for planned democratic reforms in the colonies, and later, in the immediate postWorld War II period, for the grant of early self-government. Initially imagining an
independent West African nation, WASU had written to inform the Secretary of State for
63
the colonies in 1940 of the desire to have British West African colonies be united under
one political umbrella.349 In 1941, after the publication of the Atlantic Charter, they had
submitted a memo to Clement Attlee, the then deputy Prime Minister of Britain, asking
about the fate of West Africa “in view of Britain’s intention to help countries of Europe,
Ethiopia, and Syria re-establish national independence.”350 Attlee had assured WASU
repeatedly that Africans were covered by the Atlantic Charter. Although the position of
Churchill, the then British Prime Minister, on this was evasive and actually contrary to
Attlee’s statement, WASU still insisted on a demand for “internal self-government for
West Africa immediately and complete independence in five years.”351
It was in pursuit of these objectives and rather western “liberal” agendas that
WASU would use any organization or individuals that would help it realize its goal,
including communist or leftwing individuals. Thus, WASU was receptive not only to the
support given to it by Fabian socialists like Sorensen, Rita Hinden, and Arthur Creech
Jones, who constituted important members of the then opposition Labor Party, but also to
that of other members of the Labor Party like the leftwing-oriented Fenner Brockway352
and Reginald Bridgeman of the LAI. These leftwing members of the British Labor Party
took an unequivocal stand against continued colonial rule and for outright grant of
independence to the colonies, also consistent with the libertarian doctrine of freedom that
the West used to confront Nazi Germany’s aggression. As British parliamentarians,
Brockway and Bridgeman also persistently raised questions in parliament about British
policies in the colonies and the ill effects of aspects of these policies on the colonial
subjects,353 issues that were similarly of great concern to WASU.
Other socialists in the Labor Party with less pronounced leftwing orientation, such
as Reginald Sorenson and Norman Leys, also provided support in other forums that
served to validate WASU’s expectation and discourse of progressive changes in, and self
government for the West African colonies. They gave speeches at WASU’s invitation
and at other instances on the issue of democracy in British African colonies. As far back
as 1929, Norman Leys had expressed his opinion in regard to the colonial situation,
saying that:
Many, perhaps even most of the problems of our time
were due to the desire, sometimes scarcely conscious,
of the people who are now treated as inferiors, to be
64
treated with the kind of equality found in a family.354
Leys further expressed that “in the political relations, democracy is the only means by
which ordinary men and women can acquire the same status as the specially fortunate in
some way.”355 But, he observed regrettably, that:
With few exceptions the inhabitants of most of the
countries of Tropical Africa are not allowed to aspire after
democracy, or to organize to win it, or even to get the kind
of education for themselves that would enable them to learn
how to govern themselves.356
Continuing the discourse of democracy and change in similar veins many years
later, Reginald Sorensen, then MP and as chairman of WASU’s organized conference on
West African problems in August 1942, said in his opening speech that “in accepting
democracy we accept decisively certain moral and ethical values, with all that this
involves, politically and economically.”357 He reiterated that “accepting democracy as
our criterion we reject racial domination and economic exploitation alike.”358 These were
succinct statements of what WASU and the African student member-body in WASU
stood for and privileged in their discourse of the nation but to which the British were not
receptive in the colonies at the time – not until officialdom’s paradigm shift consequent
to the 1948 Gold Coast crisis.359 WASU challenged in the 30s and early in the 40s not
only Britain’s lack of commitment to democracy in the colonies but also British
continued colonial rule.
WASU was also concerned about discrimination against Blacks in Britain. The
Colonial Office was not unconcerned about the situation resulting from the color bar in
Britain and the discrimination experienced by colonial students with housing, etc., either,
especially as this was felt to be easily exploited by the communists. Press reports in
Britain had indicated that the color bar was playing into the hands of communists who, it
was said, at least treated colonial subjects as equal citizens.360 The Colonial Office
acknowledged that “the existence of colour prejudice in the UK greatly increases antiBritish feelings amongst colonial students and enhances the attraction of Communism as
a political creed which repudiates the colour bar.”361 But the Colonial Office, however,
felt largely powerless to change it.
65
If WASU’s rhetorics and activism later turned more radical or left of the center as
it did in post-1945, it was more reflective of WASU’s disappointment with the Labor
Party’s failure to show itself true to WASU’s expectation of planned democratic reforms
and the grant of self government in the colonies when it came to power in
1945.362 WASU had expected the Labor government to use the advantage of incumbency
to work seriously for these changes in the colonies but they were to be disappointed.
Expressing WASU’s disappointment, H. O. Davies, the then General Secretary of
WASU, in his report for the year ended 1945, said that “The Colonial Office proper, in
spite of the change of Government, has not developed a change of heart in its attitude to
us.”363 William Ofori Atta, while agreeing with the Labor government on many points
but not on its colonial policy, expressed his disappointment that “the rank and file and the
leaders of the Labor Party are all saturated with the missionary ideas of the White Man’s
Burden.”364 He quoted Sir Stafford Cripps speech at Friends’ House, London in a
conference on “Peace and Empire” to the effect that there were countries in Africa which
could not govern themselves.365 WASU’s felt disappointment led to its apparent shift to
the left of the center for a brief period and was reflected in their discourse of the nation in
more Marxist terms.
Perhaps it was WASU that failed to fully understand the nature of the Fabian and
Labor socialists’ support for them, that the Party embraced socialists with differing
ideological shades,366 and that the Fabian and the Labor Party socialists had their own
agendas which may or may not coincide with those of WASU. When examined more
closely, one finds that mainstream Labor Party’s position on some fundamental colonial
issues was not that far removed from that of the Tory government before it, especially
when it came to the question of the grant of self determination.367 Colonial students in
WASU might have been up for a surprise in 1945 and thereafter but the Labor Party did
not surprise itself. The position of major thinkers in the Labor/Fabian socialist movement
reveals that the Labor Party’s advocacy of the colonial cause conformed more to a form
of enlightened self-interest, more in line with the policy of “development and control”
originating in the late 30s.368 Rita Hinden, an important voice in the Fabian Colonial
Bureau (FCB) and its secretary at the time, maintained the position as late as 1945 for
66
what she called “Partnership in Empire” to replace Trusteeship which was by now agreed
to be outmoded. This was exclusive of any agenda for decolonization. She wrote:
There is always the possibility of a complete dissolution of
the association between Britain and the colonial empire.
But no responsible person, either in the colonies or in
Britain, is calling for that at this particular moment.
Progressive thought throughout the world looks for a
greater unity and integration between nations and
peoples.369
With their disenchantment with the Labor Party, especially when now in power, latent
leftwing tendencies in WASU began to re-emerge and the discourse of the nation began
to be framed in radical/leftwing terms. Select WASU members, already exposed to
Marxist-Leninist doctrines, began to organize within WASU and to form a small
revolutionary body, the Cell, in 1946-47. Spearheading this development was Kwame
Nkrumah who had stopped in Britain on his way home to the Gold Coast from the United
States where he had spent several years studying in various institutions of higher
learning. In the course of studying there, he had also had considerable exposure to
revolutionary/radical movements and figures, from Pan Africanists, and Garveyists, to
Black communists!
The immediate post-World War II period, from 1945 onwards, would thus
witness a shift in WASU as it drifted towards radical/leftwing politics and the impact
would be felt in the colonies and among the officially perceived more moderate Africans
in the colonies. Given these developments at this time, the colonial authorities could be
said to have reasons to be worried. The moderates within WASU had seemed in the past
to have successfully stemmed the tide towards what British officials had feared might be
extremism. But the colonial government had not really worked with them as partners in
progress, contrary to the stated objectives of their renewed definition of Trusteeship, and
of Partnership in this period. The closest they got to a working relationship with the
students in WASU was in the West African Parliamentary Committee (WAPC)
established in April 1942. The Colonial Office was now faced with a real threat in the
shift to radicalism among moderate WASU intellectuals and had to contend with the
radicals in WASU like Nkrumah who now seemed about to gain supremacy.
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WASU’s apparent shift to more radical stance in the post 1945 period also
involved a belief in extra-institutional means to effect the desired changes in the colonies.
Thus, they criticized the 1947 West African delegation to London which had come to
demand change in the colonies. Having lost faith in the Fabian Colonial Bureau’s
policies and in the Labor Party’s ability to recognize what they believed was the fact that
Africans were now ready to take over the administration of their own countries, they felt
the attempts to influence policy in old ways, i.e., through delegation, etc., at that stage
would not yield expected results. Rather, they believed it was better to focus on internal
social protest movements in the colonies and to effect direct action there that would bring
the colonial government to its knees. The delegation of the National Council of Nigeria
and the Cameroons (NCNC) to Britain in 1947 was similarly criticized by WASU as they
did the West African Cocoa delegation, in line with its new thinking. WASU’s magazine
editorial comment in the fall of 1947 brought this out clearly. It stated:
The day of such delegation and deputation is long past. The
game of politics is played, or should be played, on the spot.
Presentation abroad of one’s own case, when it can be
heard at home more effectively, is an outmoded form of
social waste. … If we have the leaders and the following,
we need never again come to see Creech Jones. Creech
Jones will come to see us. For power understands only the
language of power. That is the lesson of contemporary
history that we ought to be learning now.370
This was indeed a very powerful discourse of what was to be done in regard to fighting
for democratic change and self-determination in the colonies in leftwing terms and shows
a decidedly Marxist influence.371 The newly emerging discourse of what was to be done
in the colonies was occurring at the time when Nkrumah had just arrived on the scene in
London, as earlier mentioned.372
British officialdom’s fear of West African students, many of whom were
represented in WASU, as potential channels of leftwing ideas and of communist
influence in their West African colonies appeared to be validated in the light of these
developments and of the apparent shift of WASU towards leftwing discourse of change
in the colonies. This is also particularly so in the light of existing WASU’s links with
leftwing individuals and organizations in Britain as well as internationally, and their
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residual influence on WASU. Hakim Adi records Solanke’s early contact with James
Ford, the African-American communist who presided over ITUC-NW,373 and his
response in February of 1929 to an earlier communication from Ford which had included
ten copies of the ITUC-NW’s Negro Worker publication.374 After thanking Ford and
promising to send WASU magazine to him in return, Solanke said, in regard to the Negro
Worker:
I have read it and found it to be most interesting indeed. It
is also a great eye-opener because it is full of valuable
information which hitherto our union has not been aware
of. I therefore thank you in the name of our WASU of
Great Britain and Ireland. I shall distribute the copies
forwarded to me among the members.375
However, in spite of WASU’s actual and potential links with labor and leftwing
and communist-influenced individuals and organizations in Britain, and even with
WASU’s disappointment with the Labor Party in power and their noted shift to
radicalism and communist-style rhetorics in the post 1945 period, WASU could be said to
remain more at the center. Its central goal remained the same - the realization of
progressive and democratic changes in the colonies as well as the grant of early selfgovernment for the West African colonies mainly through constitutional channels; its
radicalism at any point in time was tied to WASU’s search for the realization of these
goals. Adi notes that many WASU members, including Solanke, were infact hostile to
communism. He records anti-communist campaigns within and without WASU, most
importantly led by Solanke himself after he lost his position as WASU’s Secretary.376
Solanke claimed that all problems were the result of “communist influence” and hoped
Sorenson would help him to overcome the influence of communism in WASU.377
According to Solanke, the new WASU president, J. E. Appiah, and WASU‘s honorary
Secretary, Adenekan Ademola, were the main communist ringleaders.378 Solanke tried to
defeat them at the annual election in 1951 by establishing his own “anti-communist
party” but was defeated.379 Although Solanke’s anti-communist campaign was partly an
attempt to regain his lost influence with WASU at the beginning of the 1950s, as Adi
further notes, it is also to be noted that even before he lost influence in WASU, Solanke
did not show any strong inclination towards communism. Leftwing publications and
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discourses were to Solanke and mainstream WASU what Solanke had called them to be sources of information.380 What they chose to do with the information and how they
chose to act upon it was not as officialdom feared them to be. WASU’s position was to
cooperate with all organizations in the world that would help it to advance its liberal
agenda of self-determination for the West African colonies and within constitutional
means. As Solanke had also said:
There is nothing like co-operation between all
organizations of the world, especially among Negro
organizations with a view to defending their rights and
liberty.381
Finally, it could be said that in spite of actual contacts and exposure of overseas
African students to communist and revolutionary doctrines, they did not prove to be a
viable source of communist influence in the British West African colonies, as partly
revealed in the case of WASU. In fact, many of them return to their home colonies to
join the ranks of those conceptualized in this study as the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs,
officialdom’s constituted “moderates” of the 50s and in whose hands they left the care of
the nation at independence. Their discourse of the nation was more importantly premised
on Western liberal terms and not on communist revolutionary terms. In general, the
strength of communism as theory and as a movement remained quite weak among the
West African colonial students, as among many other West Africans in the colonies.
From the literature available on WASU, it is evident that WASU was, and remained at
best a sort of avant garde body in relation to West African colonies’ political
development and a vehicle for change in the colonies through constitutional means. This
is more in line with what became mainstream discourse of change and of the nation in the
West African colonies among African political entrepreneurs and cultural producers,
many of who had also been members of WASU while studying abroad in Britain. Adi
notes that as the colonies moved towards self-government and career prospects opened
up, many returning “communist” students became as “bourgeois in Lagos” as they had
been “proletarian in London!”382 Perhaps the CPGB follow-up confidential report on the
situation in Nigeria in 1953 in regard to former CPGB affiliates sums it up well. It noted
with disappointment, in the case of one of its close West African affiliate in WASU, Ayo
Ogunsheye, that he “no longer represents the revolutionary movement,” and that he was
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“very anti-Soviet, and very pro-Action Group.”383 The report concluded overall that “our
Nigerian comrades do return to their Fatherland and that is all we hear of them!”384
The following section explores the beginning official perceptions of colonial labor
activism385 also and of the labor organizer, in particular that of I. T. A. Wallace- Johnson,
as “communist,” in the light of their developing fear of communism in the colonies.
The Labor Organizer
British officialdom feared the power of organized labor and of the labor organizer like I.
T. A. Wallace-Johnson and his perceived radicalism of the left. Because of officialdom’s
developing fear of communism in the colonies and among labor and in response to labor
unrest in these colonies and in many parts of the British empire, particularly labor unrest
in the West Indies in the late 1930s,386 the Colonial Office had initiated labor reforms in
the colonies, closely tied to the Colonial Development ideas. The Labor Department
subsequently passed a legislation providing legal recognition to unions in 1941, with
general emphasis on the need to keep labor organizations out of politics and from the
influence of “agitators” and “communists.” Before then and earlier in the 1920s, the
British colonial government had passed various regulations in their colonies as means of
controlling labor. In the Gold Coast, for example, to further discourage any development
of labor along perceived radical lines and in their efforts to control labor there, the
government had passed a Regulation of Employment Ordinance as early as 1920-21 with
a broad provision against the “strike agitator.”387 This was in direct response to the labor
unrest and strike threats in the inflationary years of 1919-1921. In seeking to provide
legal recognitions to trade unions, part of the 1938 report of the Chief Inspector of Labor
had stated that:
It is much better to recognize a reputable and responsible
organization through whom workers can voice their
grievances than to allow those grievances to remain
unventilated. If such recognition is made there will be less
danger from the agitators and secret societies.388
As Kraus has observed, the basic intent of official recognition to trade unions in
the colonies was less to help trade unions than to control them, to ensure their “proper”
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and “non-political development.”389 Orde-Brown was appointed to the post of Labor
adviser in 1938 in the newly-created Labor Department and British trade unionists were
subsequently appointed to various posts in the colonies in order to offset “irresponsible
and misguided leadership,” and to “assist and encourage the adoption of collective
bargaining in preference to the strike weapon.”390 Considerable power was given to them
to interfere as they would in trade union activities, such as the examination of records and
accounts, and to deny recognition to duly elected officials by members if by official
standard they were considered “unsuitable.” The 1941 Trades Union Ordinance which
legalized unions compelled union registration with the provincial assemblies of chiefs as
well “so that there should be no danger now of subversive organizations being
established.”391
In the Gold Coast, officials were most fearful of workers in the Sekondi-Takoradi
railway and harbor industries because of their perceived proclivities to militancy.392 As
the most prone to militant action among workers in the Gold Coast they had caught
official attention right from the start. Their militancy had led to official fear of
communist infiltration through these categories of workers. One of the official reports on
communism in the colonies singled out the Port of Takoradi as early as 1921 as being the
main center of communist activity in the Gold Coast, with its believed recurrent contacts
with seamen and other emissaries and go-betweens “bringing funds and literature from
Europe.”393 The Gold Coast government remained most sensitive to this cluster of
workers and fearful of their potentials for militant action.
It could be said that colonial officials’ fear was not totally unfounded, given the
pretensions of the communist movement in its high tide in the 20s and early 30s towards
the colonies of the West, theorized as the West’s weakest links for easy proselytizing.394
Specialized organs of the Communist International - the Third International - such as the
League Against Imperialism (LAI) and the International of Seamen and Harbor Workers
(ISHW), were set up as sources of communist influence among the Black population,
specifically among those identified as strategic individuals in the colonies. In 1924, the
Baku Conference drew up thesis on how to propagate the movement among the colonial
peoples. Many articles published in the ISHW’s magazine, the Negro Worker (NW),
geared towards revolutionary activities among Blacks, identified Black workers - seamen,
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dockers, etc. - as the worst victims of discrimination while white workers were regarded
as less oppressed by comparison.395 They noted the discrepancy in wages between Black
and White workers in America and the perceived even worse conditions imposed on
Black seamen and dockers in Africa and the West Indies. These workers were noted to
be grossly exploited by companies that did business in these places such as Elder
Dempster, John Holt, United Africa Company, and Woermann which were said to
enforce terrible pay, poor working conditions, and extra-official working hours, and were
known to brutally suppress protests and the attempts by these workers to organize.396
The same situation against Black sailors and dockers was identified across the board in
Dakar, Bathurst, Freetown, Monrovia, Gold Coast, Nigeria, Cape Town, and Durban in
Africa and in the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica, Port of Spain, Trinidad, Georgetown,
British Guiana, and Bridgetown, Barbados, as well as in Haiti, Panama, and in all the
other ports of the West Indies and South America.397 Furthermore, some serious but what
ended to be weak attempts were made in the interwar years by the Third International398
to infiltrate the colonial territories before its capitulation in the late 1930s to the Popular
Front Alliance with Western powers against Nazi Germany.
Given these developments and communism’s pretensions towards Blacks and
colonial subjects, colonial officials could be said to have cause to fear possible
communist influence in their colonies. Also, there was evidence to suggest that it was
beginning to capture the imagination of some of their subjects, particularly some union
organizers. In Nigeria, a prominent Zikist trade union leader with labor socialist
orientation, Nduka Eze, would later write on how “the new doctrines drew attention to
new facts.”399 However, official fear of colonial labor or of socialist-oriented labor
organizers as sources or potential sources of communist influence in the colonies was not
validated by the actual influence of communism on them or of their ability to successfully
conduct communist-style politics in the colonies.400 But officialdom would continue to
categorize socialist-oriented labor and their discourse of the nation in socially
transforming ways as “communist” and would seek to silence them.
The following section takes a closer look at Isaac Theophilus Akunna WallaceJohnson whose case dramatizes officialdom’s opposition to perceived labor radicals and
their labeling as “communist,” as well as the extent to which officialdom would go to
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marginalize such colonial radicals, including their actual physical removal from the
scene.401 His case also demonstrates the limits of the appeal or strength of communism in
British West Africa.
The Professional Agitator: I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson402
At one level of observation, Wallace-Johnson’s personal profile and activities
could indeed be fitted into the category of a “revolutionary” and as validation of official
fear of a labor organizer like him as a potential source of communism in the colonies. He
was a trade union organizer with labor-socialist orientation; created and headed a West
African-wide radical social protest organization, the West African Youth League
(WAYL); 403 was a persistent critique of colonial administration and of imperial rule, and
privileged the discourse of the nation in socially transforming ways; an energetic critique
whose voice was heard and presence felt in the West African colonies as well as in Great
Britain, up to the seat of government in the British Parliament;404 a versatile critique who
tried to transcend social and physical boundaries and was known to have traveled widely
and schooled in the birthplace of communism - Russia - in 1932 in the People’s
University in Moscow;405 and was someone who, in the other West African colonies like
the Gold Coast, was believed to have his “fingers in all the many pies available for him
there!”406 These may indeed be cause for British officialdom’s focused attention on him,
bordering on paranoia.407 This study contends, however, that his potentials as a channel
of communism into the colonies were more limited than they might appear to be.
Wallace Johnson was an informed critic of imperialism and of the shortcomings
of colonial administration in the colonies and who was tireless in his pursuit of
progressive and transformative changes in the colonies through organizing, including the
holding of seminars, etc. He would, like many other radicalized colonials, use the
language and discourse of the left, i.e., of Marxism-Leninism, to constitute his opposing
discourse of the nation and of change in colonial society and to imagine the nation in
West Africa in socially progressive and mutually-inclusive terms. LaRay Denzer
regarded him as one of the most important African politicians in the interwar period and
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went as far as to say that he was responsible for introducing the technique of mass
political organization and Marxism-Leninism to West African politics.408
Like the Communist International before its capitulation to the Western Popular
Front Alliance in the 30s, Wallace-Johnson tried to link the phenomenon of imperialism
and colonialism to that of fascism and to show the contradiction in Western imperial
powers' position in sustaining the first two while fighting against the latter.409 Wallace
Johnson pointed to the interconnection between the West position against fascism and
that of imperialism, what he captioned as “imperial defense and the defense of
imperialism.”410 He maintained that anti-fascist struggles by the West as constituted by
the West only strengthened their hold on empire and that the struggle against fascism and
war should be an inseparable part of the struggle for liberty at home.411 Wallace-Johnson
was vehemently opposed to the use of the colonies' resources in human and material
terms to aid the Western Powers’ war efforts.412 He and other colonial radicals argued
that contrary to the notion of fighting to keep the world safe, the world that would be kept
safe was the imperialists’ and in ways that would perpetuate the conditions of servitude
and continued subordination of the colonial Peoples. Peace in the western world, he and
others further argued, was being sought at the expense of the freedom and peace of the
colonial subjects.413 Statements like these in Wallace-Johnson's discourses, some of
which reflected crucial components of leftwing of socialist and labor movement
discourses, only served to alarm colonial officials and to validate their fears of
communism’s infiltration into the colonies and of Wallace-Johnson's potentials as a
conduit pipe for this.
Wallace-Johnson and other handful of colonials like R. B. Wuta Ofei and Bankole
Awoonor-Renner414 of the Gold Coast could indeed be said to have helped to introduce
early into the colonies the discourse of anti-imperialism and of the nation in West Africa
in quite radical, possibly leftwing formulation. While other colonials were prosecuting
what Lonsdale referred to as the politics of local activism in this period,415 WallaceJohnson was beginning to center the politics of anti-imperialism and implicitly of
political self-determination for the colonies at this time. He tried to continue to sustain
the argument that the pursuit of liberty in Europe could not be divorced from the grant of
liberty and freedom in the colonies. He also tried to translate these held beliefs and
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principles into political action in his WAYL movement which was also geared towards
the resolution through political means of local and social issues in which workers’
particular grievances formed a central part.416 These ranged from issues of taxation, low
wages, and poor living conditions to land alienation and sedition laws. These issues
helped to draw followership to his WAYL in his home colony of Sierra Leone and in the
other British West African colonies, particularly the Gold Coast. The WAYL formed one
of the major opposition mounted in the Gold Coast against the 1934 Sedition and
Waterworks Ordinances that the colonial government tried to enact there in an attempt to
suppress unrest in the Gold Coast and in the other colonies. Wallace Johnson also
succeeded in winning a workmen’s compensation in 1937/1938 for the Gold Coast mine
workers whose industry was one of the hardest hit in the depression years of the 30s.
Wallace-Johnson’s radical discourses and social and political practices and his
perceived leftwing leanings by officials caused them such great concern that he was
carefully watched wherever he went, and in whatever he said – or did not say! There
were occasional dissenting voices and opinions within official circles that tried to shift
official imagination from the sound of Wallace-Johnson’s words to its content, that is, to
the root cause of the social issues he was drawing attention to and on which his
movement was predicated in the colonies. A sympathetic MP, Mr. Paling, questioning
the decision to detain him when this was being considered in the Home Office, asked:
Has this man been guilty of any serious crime sufficient to
keep in detention in this way; and is not his crime that he
had been agitating for better conditions among the people,
miners in particular, who are working in the mines for as
little as 6d per day?417
Wallace-Johnson was indeed giving voice to the felt dismal living conditions experienced
by both workers and non-workers alike in these colonies consequent to the depression of
the 1930s. Another colonial official, the colonial judge in the trial of the gunners in
Sierra Leone in 1939 and in which Wallace-Johnson was implicated, would proclaim that
“even an agitator needs material to work with.”418
It is not clear, however, that these official lone voices made any impression on
mainstream official mind in regard to how they viewed Wallace-Johnson’s activities and
his criticism of colonial administration and government. Wallace-Johnson was cast in the
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category of the “communist” and officialdom meant to keep him frozen in it. What
impressed officials and most concerned them was the support he was getting in Britain
from British liberals and socialists, including leftwing socialists alike, a select few of who
were MPs sympathetic to his cause. British officialdom was indeed uncomfortable with
the presence of Wallace-Johnson in Great Britain where he was also giving them restless
time through the support of his leftwing contacts and their questions in the British
parliament. These were raising questions in parliament in regard to the issues and
grievances in the colonies that Wallace-Johnson was bringing to light and in regard to the
shortcomings of British administration in the colonies in general.419 O. G. R. Williams’s
remark that “his local prestige gains considerable support from the fact that he is able to
get questions answered by the Secretary of State in the House of Commons”420
underscores the nature of this support.
Wallace-Johnson’s capacity for getting sympathetic response from the seat of
government in Britain may have increased his local stature but it further alienated him
from the colonial authorities’ in Sierra Leone who were intent on removing him from the
colony. However, because of the nature of this support, officialdom was more cautious
as to how they carried this out. Wallace-Johnson was interned in 1940421 but British
officials would have more readily got rid of him before then but for the fact that they
were sensitive to the support he had from those important individuals in Britain. He
could have been locked up for good indefinitely in possibly unmonitored poor conditions
without anyone but the colonial officials having knowledge of his internment when
colonial officials were thinking of locking him up during the war years. His case was,
however, brought to parliament by his MP supporters and due to parliamentary pressure,
a debate had to be carried out in regard to the official plan to intern him for the period of
the war. In the light of this support, the Secretary of State wrote to the Governor of
Sierra Leone advising him that the planned deportation of Wallace-Johnson had become
an issue in parliament and that while he was anxious to give the Governor all possible
support and help, they “must be careful to avoid action which would raise serious
parliamentary difficulty.”422 He asked the Governor to provide him with the facts of the
case on the strength of which he would want to recommend the Restriction or
Deportation Order, stating:
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You will appreciate that the reason for this request is that
there are political factors at this end which I might have to
weigh and not any lack of confidence in yourself.423
Attention would continue to be focused on Wallace-Johnson’s case in parliament and
colonial officials would remain sensitive to this in their dealings with him. O. G. R.
Williams further remarked in November, 1939 on how Wallace-Johnson was still
exciting a certain amount of interest in parliament and on how they “shall probably get
some more questions about his detention before long.”424
Wallace-Johnson’s radical discourse of the nation and of change in colonial
society, linked to communism in officialdom’s mind, was opposed by officialdom who
sought to close the space for such alternative imaginings of the nation and of change.
Wallace Johnson was not, however, a communist as officialdom would prefer to label
him. Although LaRay Denzer commented that he was responsible for introducing the
technique of mass political organization and Marxism-Leninism to West African
politics, 425 Wallace-Johnson did not prove, from the literature and documentation
available on him thus far, to have engaged in any appreciable or sustainable Marxist or
communist-style politics in the colonies. Wallace-Johnson was at best a would-be social
reformer, drawing attention to causes of disenchantment and alienation in colonial
society, particularly among workers in the colonies, and pointing to a desired more
egalitarian society. Ibrahim Abdullah, commenting on the genuine causes that gave
validity to Wallace-Johnson’s WAYL in the 1930s, remarked that:
Coming into existence at the end of the depression when
the price of primary producer goods had recorded an all
time low, when the cost of living of the general populace
was constantly beyond their earnings, and when workers
were unable to make ends meet, the birth of an organization
addressing these issues was more than propitious: the
organizing-secretary and the movement were the right
things in the right place.426
Wallace-Johnson sought official intervention through organizing for the goal of social
change in the colonies. He would take his cause to the seat of government in Britain as
part of his strategy to get official action taken in regard to those issues he engaged with in
the colonies.
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In spite of his potentials for radicalizing colonial society through his politics of
social change based on labor organizing in the colonies and his somewhat connectedness
with the international left, Wallace-Johnson’s capacity for revolutionary politics that his
rhetorics and discourses and social and political practice might have suggested and that
officials feared was, however, quite reduced. The social realities of Wallace-Johnson’s
colony of Sierra Leone as well as of the rest of British West African colonies were such
that did not provide fertile grounds for communist-style politics of social change.427 Nor
did Wallace-Johnson’s praxis serve to effect this shift. Although he was able to fairly
successfully use the language and discourse of the left to constitute his own discourse
against imperialism and colonialism and to contend with what was becoming the masterdiscourse of the nation, he was unable to successfully make the transition to leftwing
politics in the colonies. Closer examination of his thoughts and activities, including the
nature of his contacts with leftwing-oriented movements and individuals, do not reveal
communism to be a strong element in the total summation of his discourse or career.
Neither was it such in the British West African colonies in this period, or even later, as
revealed in later chapters, and as earlier stated. The Third International’s attempt to
infiltrate the colonies was itself very weak, unsystematic, and confused.428
Wallace-Johnson may also be better described as an enigma, his thoughts and
actions being more complex to analyze than what official labeling of him would tend to
portray. It could be said that this complexity was also an important part of his failure to
succeed, although many great thinkers have been known to exhibit complex thought
structures, albeit more sophisticated than his. A few scholars who have done some works
on him like John Hargreaves and LaRay Denzer have remarked that Wallace Johnson
posed a problem of analysis. Hargreaves, in his attempt to come to an understanding of
Wallace-Johnson's brand of politics and of the political events in Sierra Leone in the
period under study, remarked that Wallace-Johnson was “a critic of colonialism who
remains difficult to evaluate.”429 Hargreaves, however, did not engage with the challenge
posed by Wallace-Johnson’s politics and discourses.
The problem of understanding Wallace-Johnson’s thought and politics is rooted,
in part, in the complexity of colonial society itself and of the challenge it posed for the
politics of social transformation which Wallace-Johnson was unable to surmount. 430
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Wallace-Johnson is not known to be a sophisticated thinker, like Amilcar Cabral of the
former Portuguese African colony of Guinea Bissau, to be able to confront such
challenges successfully.431 Wallace-Johnson, though more anti-imperialist and energetic
than many other colonial radicals of his time in the British West African colonies in the
interwar period especially, revealed the difficulty for him of effecting a dialectical unity
between thought and action.432 Unlike Amilcar Cabral or Cheggan in Guyana or Mao
Tse Tung in China who succeeded in establishing a revolutionary dialectical exchange
between thought and action, Wallace-Johnson failed to do so. With Wallace-Johnson,
whatever elements of revolutionary Marxism-Leninism may be resonating in his
discourses, they were articulating with other forms of indigenous radical thoughts without
transcending them. Denzer, in trying to grapple with the problem posed by WallaceJohnson’s thoughts and politics, rightly noted that he failed, for example, to successfully
translate the terms of leftwing politics into the terms of indigenous politics, unlike
Haidarra Contorfilli, a contemporary of Wallace-Johnson, who successfully translated the
terms of his rebellion into the idiom of Islam.433 The reasons for Wallace-Johnson’s lack
of capacity in these ways are quite complex and part of this is related to his lack of
attention to the cultural imperative.
However, in spite of Wallace-Johnson’s inability to match his political will with a
capacity for successful politics of social transformation, 434 official perceptions and
labeling of him as an “agitator” and “communist,” etc., would remain strong, especially
in the 1930s. Colonial officials, unable – or unwilling - to draw the distinction between
the legitimate reasons behind his agitation for the improvement of labor and other socioeconomic conditions in the colonies and an anti-British seditious movement in Sierra
Leone, and intolerant of his radicalizing vision and social and political practice,
imprisoned him for libel in 1940. 435 As the British government focused on preparing the
colonies to assist in fighting Nazi Germany in World War II, Wallace-Johnson was
removed from the scene and interred for the whole period of the war. He would return
later in the post-World War II period to continue his discourse of imperialism and of the
nation within the Sierra Leone Legislature where he had gained entry initially on the
ticket of the Creole party, the National Council, and later as an Independent.
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To conclude, British officialdom’s category of the communist and their anticommunist grid, beginning to be applied as early as the 1920s in West Africa to those
who officials disliked, would continue in the post-World War II period, in the combined
context of the Cold War and of the renewed importance of Africa to Britain in the light of
Britain’s post-World War II problems and crises, including crises in the colonies.
Officialdom’s fear of communism in the colonies had subsided during World War II, a
period also of lessened crisis such as labor strikes because of the war situation. It was
also a period of rapprochement, though would prove temporary, between the Western
bloc and the Communist bloc in the Popular Front Alliance forged in order to
successfully combat Nazi Germany’s world aggression together. The post-World War II
period witnessed resumed and heightened crises in the colonies at the same time as the
rivalry between the Western bloc and the Soviet bloc resurfaced and solidified in the
Cold War. With these developments both in the colonies and in the international arena
also came renewed fear of communist Soviet Union’s infiltration into the West’s sphere
of influence, especially their colonies. Accompanying these developments was British
officialdom’s resort to labeling as communist or communist-inspired436 colonial social
radicals and any discourses that represented alternative space for the imagining of the
nation in opposition to that privileged or imagined by officialdom. The 1948 Gold Coast
crisis represented a landmark in the active return to this official mindset and British
officialdom’s anti-communist grid in their West African colonies.437 This is explored in
the following chapters.
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Chapter 4
Post-World War II Transitions: Reconstituting Community
Introduction
This chapter seeks to examine the shifting political boundaries and aspects of the
contradictory developments towards mutually-inclusive and mutually-exclusive
categories as individuals sought to reposition themselves vis-à-vis the community and to
reconstitute rights and belongings in the post-World War II period onwards. It attempts
to examine continuity in transition and transitions as moments when contradictions began
to crystallize. It examines some socially relevant interventions of colonial social forces
in the post-World War II period and focuses in particular on the conjunctures of the late
40s in the colonies, specifically, the 1948 Gold Coast crisis as a moment of transition,
effecting certain shifts among colonials and British officialdom alike. It seeks to examine
the competing visions of community and citizenship in the discourses and practices of
various individuals and social forces, using as case-studies the Abeokuta Women’s Union
social movement and the 1948 Gold Coast crises. In exploring the socially-relevant
conflicts of interest among colonials, it seeks to reveal how they transcended particular
categories of i.e., economic, gender, etc., at the same time as they were composed of
these. It attempts to provide more adequate understanding of these conflicts and the
social movements that they gave rise to through their analysis in relational terms and as
coordinates of other analytical categories, i.e., class, community, and gender, for
example. This chapter seeks to begin to explore how these categories were being made
into “nation” in mutually-inclusive and mutually-exclusive terms by certain colonial
social forces in the complex and changing context of the post-World War II period.
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The Socially-relevant Interventions
The immediate post-World War II period witnessed heightened crises and a variety of
social movements among various colonial social forces comprising women, workers,
farmers, ex-servicemen, western educated Africans, professional and merchant forces,
and semi-literate forces, etc.438 Studies have noted these crises to be expressions of felt
economic grievances439 in the immediate aftermath of the war and have also described
them as the failure of rising expectations. This chapter seeks to also show how these
crises and social movements transcended the hidden abode of production – or distribution
– and, in the case of women, also transcended gender while these categories also formed
important components of the crises and social movements that developed as expression of
these crises. It seeks to reveal the diffused nature of these movements and how certain
interests and issues were beginning to be displaced and others centered as individuals and
social forces were repositioning themselves vis-à-vis the community and seeking to
reformulate rights and belongings.
Social movements among women, for example, such as those of the Lagos Market
Women Association (LMWA)440 and the Abeokuta Women Union (AWU) 441 in Nigeria,
and the Sierra Leone Women’s Movement (SLWM), 442 were, indeed, at an important
level of observation, economic and gender specific, given the immediate issues that gave
rise to these movements, their initial composition, and leadership. They were initially
composed mostly of market women and traders and arose initially out of the desire of
these women for changes that would ameliorate their felt condition of hardship in their
income-generating activities. The LMWA, under their leader, Madam Alimotu Pelewura,
appealing against continuation of wartime economic restrictions, appealed to Captain
Pullen, the Deputy Controller of Native Foodstuffs, at his office in Lagos, and before the
Commissioner of the Colony, “not to take bread out of the mouth of the Lagos Market
Women.”443 The AWU, frustrated with continued war-time controls and the way the
trading activities of the colonial chief, Alake Ademola, were compounding their own
trade and livelihood,444 petitioned the resident of Abeokuta Province, Mr. J. H. Blair, and
complained that the:
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Alake is a voracious trader: he trades with all the different
firms at Ibara in almost every line of (their) goods and under
different names. He buys a great quantity of all fast lines
with his prerogative as a King ... The small quantity left from
the month's quota would have to be shared by all the other
traders both men and women.445
The SLWM was initiated among Sierra Leone women traders in similar
circumstances by its leader, Constance Cummings-John. The women’s movements at
this level of analysis and in origin therefore did present as gender-specific and economic,
tied to their means of livelihood. But the economic was also the political and the social.
Other latent political and social issues soon came to the fore and took on equal
significance in the process of articulating explicitly economic grievances. As the AWU
movement progressed, for example, the discourse of the women soon shifted from “the
Alake is a voracious trader” to a political discourse of “no taxation without
representation.”446 AWU’s grievances from 1946 till 1949 was also focused on removing
the onerous burden taxation imposed on the mass of Egba women as well as on having
the government provide representative rights to women.447 The women were seeking to
reconstitute gender norms in colonial society. In their march on the Alake’s palace in
1948 they sang:
Oba Oluwa agbe wa lekee lori aree. Awa ko da wo Ori
bowun e e kokowa sago e Awa koda awa koda Bowun e
ko ko wa sago awa ko da.448
(The Lord will justify and avenge us of the truth. We will not pay tax. If you wish, you
may put us all into your prison. We will not pay. If you like you may imprison us all, we
will not pay tax).
The causes as well as the composition and goals of these women’s movements
were, however, even more complex and multifaceted, as further analysis would reveal.
Women’s concerns and issues were never divorced from issues affecting the rest of
society with whom they were connected in essential ways. The women’s movements
were also symptomatic of a complex array of issues that extended beyond particular
economic grievances or the narrow confines of what directly impacted women. The
AWU movement further became symptomatic of a complex array of ills that bedeviled
the Egba Native Authority (ENA) and local African society in general and which were
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tied to the Indirect Rule system. As the movement developed, it came to represent not
only women but also entrenched male constituencies as the organized body of the
Ogbonis,449 major religious groupings such as the Christians and the Mohammedans, and
other social forces in Egbaland all of who felt marginalized and dispossessed in the ENA
system. And as the causes and composition became varied so did identities of interests
and goals the politics tied to this. The nation and citizenry were discursively constituted
in mutually-conflicting ways. Issues of gender, class, and community became
inextricably mixed in the movement in complex and contradictory ways.450
Workers activism was similarly diffused though they also appear at one level of
analysis to present a “group” character, i.e., as originating from the abode of production
and concerned with issues affecting them as workers. At other levels of examination,
however, workers movements and discourses are also more complex and expressive of a
variety of interests and goals. Workers self-perceived interests and identity remained
multifaceted and in flux.451
Closer examination and in-depth exploration of the trajectory of these
movements, as attempted below in the case of the AWU, for example, reveals that they
transcended particular categories of, i.e., economic, gender, class, etc. Though the
women’s movements originated as gender-specific, they also transcended gender and
were complex and diffused. The women organized in the AWU movement had risen
against felt harsh economic conditions and in protest against the activities of the Alake as
a “voracious trader,” who was “disturbing [their] trade in rice and other commodities,”452
as well as out of a desire to also change gender norms that had marginalized them in the
colonial economy and in society in more equitable ways. But, as noted above, they were
also organized in protest against a variety of other causes453 and goals and the movement
was composed of other social forces, including men. In this movement which became
transformed over time, categories of “gender,” “class,” “community,” etc., intersected in
quite complex and contradictory ways and reflected inherent mutually divergent goals as
it developed. The AWU movement in Abeokuta is examined in detail as a case-study in
this chapter because it is instructive of these developments in other places and instances
in many ways.
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The Abeokuta Women’s’ Movement
The examination of the AWU in this study is not a biographical study of its historically
famous leader, Funlayo Ransome-Kuti (later changed to Anikulapo-Kuti), though her life
is played out in significant ways in the course of examining and analyzing the movement
she led and in the light of the goals of this study.454 The AWU movement and its leader
have also been a popular subject of study especially among feminist scholars. Cheryl
Johnson-Odim and Nina Mba, for example, have done some very valuable works on
Funlayo Ransome-Kuti (FRK) and the AWU movement.455 This study seeks to examine
the AWU movement, later turned into the Nigerian Women’s Movement (NWU), and its
leader, FRK, in ways that previous works have not focused on or fully addressed. This
relates to some of this study’s central goals involving the examination of aspects of the
political and cultural contestations of community and citizenship among certain colonial
social forces, including how certain analytical categories were being made into “nation,”
as well as how British officialdom were attempting to delegitimize the socially radical
intervention of colonial radicals with their label of “communist” and their anticommunist grid. FRK’s discourses and practices and her visions and goals in the
movements she led are located in this study in the category of social radicalism. Her
discourses and movements are examined in new light in this study as symbolic of British
officialdom’s category of the “communist” and of the effects of this categorization on the
form of social intervention she represented.456 FRK and the movements she led
exemplify British officialdom’s negative reaction against the terms in which FRK and
other social radicals were seeking to privilege the discourse of the nation and of
citizenship. To officialdom, Funlayo Ransome-Kuti represented the type of colonial that
they did not want to have any influence in the affairs of the colony. They perceived her
kind of social intervention as “extremist” and “communist” and would seek to
marginalize and undermine her and the movements she led.457
The AWU movement reveals, on the one hand, the potentials for the development
of groupness458 as seen in the consensus attained among various social forces within the
movement which effected the abdication, though temporary (from July 29, 1948 -1950),
of the Alake against whom all had grievances. It also reveals, on the other hand, the
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potentials for the creation of the “nation” and imagining of citizenship in mutuallyexclusive terms. Both potentials were actualized in this movement, leading in
contradictory ways, and involving some creative tension. Categories of “gender,”
“class,” “community,” etc., were constituted in mutually-inclusive terms in the social and
political practice of FRK and some other social radicals and progressives in the
organization simultaneously as these categories were also being constituted in mutuallyexclusive terms by the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs who were also important
constituencies in this movement. As noted earlier, the AWU had come to represent, as it
developed, not only women but also entrenched male constituencies, such as the
organized body of the Ogbonis, major religious groupings such as the Christians and the
Mohammedans, and other social forces in Egbaland all of who felt marginalized and
dispossessed in the Egba Native Authorities system.
Thus, the AWU movement soon became an embodiment of conflicting interests
and of opposing forces or of otherwise strange bedfellows, united only by a common
immediate goal of getting rid of the Alake and once that was achieved, the many lines of
division within the organization began to surface. In the movement were progressive
forces, such as Funlayo Ransome-Kuti, with a socially radical vision of society and of
citizenship as based on equal and fair representation of all constituent members. In the
movement were also reactionary forces like the Ogbonis, old power brokers in precolonial Egbaland who sought a return to old privileges, privileges that were exclusive to
them only. Their vision of the nation and of citizenry was exclusive of equitable
representation of women and other grassroot constituencies.
The Ogbonis had joined forces with the women and other interest groups in the
AWU to fight against the inequities of the Sole Native Authority (SNA) system459 as then
constituted and as symbolized in the Alake but they were not seeking to democratize the
system across-the-board – irrespective of some of their rhetorics to the contrary. They
had appeared at times to be at the forefront of the tenuous coalition of all aggrieved social
forces but it was more in pursuit of their narrow interest. They decried the diminution of
their erstwhile role and status as well as the perceived threats to their economic base in
the colonial state. They condemned the Alake's undue interference, among other things,
in negotiations between Egba land owners and foreigners in the matter of acquisition or
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lease of lands for commercial and other purposes. The Ogbonis, who had also been
important land owners, perceived their economic interests to be at stake in the land and
other transactions between the Alake and foreign interests. They were thus attempting in
the AWU movement to situate grievances more particular to their group within the
context of communal grievances and in the otherwise more broad-based AWU
movement. Thus, in the name of the people of Egbaland, the Ogbonis decried the fact
that the Alake, through his “cunningness,” had “impoverished the Egba people and …
amassed all the good things of the land to himself also at the expense of the people.”460
The cause of the Ogboni’s grievances was even more fundamentally rooted in
their continued exclusion from participation or effective participation in those institutions
that conferred power and privileges in the colonial administrative structures. The
Ogbonis, leading the religious coalition as well, were fighting against their exclusion
from those institutions which they believed should be under their control by tradition but
from which they were excluded in the colonial Native Authority System. They
demanded that the “power and privileges of the Ogbonis” which they “enjoyed up to the
end of the reign of late Alake Gbadebo,” and which subsequently had been “absolutely
seized” from them and from the Christians and Mohammedans in Egbaland be “restored
to them,” as well as the power of the Ogbonis as kingmakers.461 Also, although their
joint resolution of July 1948 ostensibly embraced democratic principles, whatever
democratic components that were inscribed were circumscribed in their appeal to
tradition in the resolution. The resolution had called for the regularization of the Sole
Native Authority along democratic lines, “consistent with Egba Native Laws and
Custom” and for authority to be vested in the Egba Central Council (ECC), the Alake to
step down as the president of the Council, and the president to be appointed subsequently
by the Egba people.462 It called for the abolishment of the Native Court of Appeal held at
the Afin (i.e., the Alake's palace) as this was “being abused by the Alake,” and requested
that cases from Ake grade “A” Court on appeal should go straight to the Supreme
Court.463 The Alake, like many Yoruba chiefs, was also using his prerogatives as chief
and customary court judge to exert influence over the allocation of locally based
resources as productive resources in land and even women to his advantage.464
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However, as soon as the goal of the abdication of the Alake was attained and as
the colonial government started enacting certain changes and creating openings in the
institutions of power, including the reallocation of resources,465 inherent schisms and
conflicting interests and reactionary elements among the varied forces that the AWU was
now composed of started to surface. The developing trend towards National Societies
that had initially seemed promising in the AWU became increasingly undermined by the
inherent mutually conflicting interests of the different social forces within the movement
that were now manifesting.466 Individuals and forces within AWU positioned
themselves vis-à-vis the “community” and were privileging the discourse of rights &
belongings in mutually-inclusive and/or mutually-exclusive terms.
Among some of the constituent members of the coalition, the “nation” began to be
imagined in mutually-exclusive terms in their perceived self-interest. Subsequent to the
abdication of the Alake, attempts were begun by the colonial administration to effect
some changes in the Sole Native Authority (SNA) system in Egbaland and to reconstitute
it along what promised to be democratic lines. It became part of, as well as impetus for
the broader process of local administrative restructuring being undertaken at this time by
British officialdom at various levels of their West African colonies. Here, in Abeokuta
Southern Provinces of Nigeria, the Egba Central Council (ECC) was reconstituted in the
attempt to broaden the base of representation and was also made the Native Authority for
the Egba Division of the Abeokuta Province in place of the Alake.467 The changes
involved the incorporation for the first time of a handful of women in the administration.
Four women, all of them from the AWU executives including Mrs. Kuti, were appointed
to the Interim Council established to replace the SNA. The taxes against which the
women had demonstrated were also abolished at this time. The Ogbonis, however, cried
out against the inclusion of women in the reconstituted Egba Native Authority - the Egba
Central Council (ECC) - and in the Egba Native Courts as “against Egba custom and
constitution.”468 The Ogbonis in the AWU, in agitating for change, were looking to the
past and to the restoration of the privileges that had sustained them as a class and to the
exclusion of women’s direct representation in the governing institutions of Egbaland.
They failed to take note of the passage of time and of the emerging new social order.
Their appeal to tradition as if static in these otherwise renewed context was to serve their
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narrow interests. Also, contrary to their representation of tradition and of women’s roles
and positions in Egbaland and in pre-colonial times, women were not devoid of power in
state and society in Egbaland and in many other African societies in pre-colonial times.
There were also known to be women Ogbonis, women chiefs, Obas, rulers, and warriors
in Egbaland and elsewhere in pre-colonial African societies.469
Contradictory Responses and Interpretations
The development towards groupness in the AWU would continue to be undermined by
the corresponding development towards mutually-exclusive categories. As changes were
being made by the colonial authorities and as opportunities were being provided for more
members of Egbaland to enter into institutions that conferred relative power and prestige,
conflicting notions of entitlements and of who should be allowed into the new institutions
surfaced. Entrenched patriarchal forces sought to capture power for themselves and to
exclude women from these institutions, as revealed in the case of the Ogbonis, for
example. In the on-going reconstitution of the SNA system in Egbaland, the Ogbonis,
who had now gained representation in the ECC, became strongly opposed to sharing
power subsequently with the few women that had also gained entry into that body, as
earlier indicated. Even though they had earlier claimed to be speaking for all Egba
people, including women,470 they would now decry the presence of these women in the
newly reconstituted ECC. Earlier in September 1948, when the composition of the Egba
Appeals’ Court had been discussed at the ECC, the Ogbonis had also turned down Mrs.
Kuti's suggestion to have a woman included in the Appeals’ Court. Their opposition had
been defended then also on the grounds that the idea was “against Egba custom and
constitution” and the motion of Chief Akinwande Thomas which rejected the suggestion
was carried.471 The Ogbonis’ stand against the inclusion of women in the new
institutions of power was in spite of the dominance and the very visible presence of
women in the AWU movement for change and the strength of the women’s opposition in
facilitating the resultant changes. This was also in spite of the fact that the Ogbonis,
along with other male coalitions in the AWU, had earlier petitioned the District Officer,
in fighting against the inequities of the SNA, for a “democratic and not autocratic
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government.”472 In reality, however, the Ogbonis and other male interest groups in the
AWU, in the name of “community interests,” were attempting to foster a “class” project
that would confer power to them while simultaneously excluding women, a significant
section of members of the community that they claimed to be fighting for - and with - in
the AWU movement. For example, the signatories to the resolution of 9th July, 1948, a
total of 46 men of “substance and power” in the Abeokuta community, did not include a
single female signatory, and yet the resolution claimed to have been adopted by about
“40,000 men and women in attendance.”473
The abdication of the Alake, the beginning resolution of the conflicts, and the
changes and openings in the SNA system brought the inherent divisions and
contradictions among the movement’s participants to the surface. Gendered-based
discourse of the nation in exclusive terms by the Ogbonis and some other males in the
AWU movement intersected with FRK’s and other progressives’ attempts to make the
categories of gender, class, etc., into “nation” in mutually-inclusive categories.
The women radicals and progressives in the AWU, on their part, had gone as far
as advocating the “legitimate” rights of the Ogbonis to be respected in a reconstituted
native administration, while the Ogbonis were defining those rights in ways that were
mutually incompatible with those of women. The women’s goal of seeking a new
political arrangement that was inclusive of men’s as well as women’s interests was
democratically based and well-intentioned. But their own appeal for male representation
on the basis of the latter’s “legitimate” rights, i.e., based on tradition, was ill-formed and
only served in the end to strengthen the Ogbonis’ more reactionary appeal to tradition
based on their perceived self-interest. In their suggested reforms of the Egba Native
Administration, the women had advocated, among other things, that “the legitimate rights
of the Ogboni Chiefs should be restored to them.”474 In seeking changes in the Finance
Committee, they had also suggested that:
The present special Ordinance Committee should be
constituted Finance Committee to be elected annually or
triennially by the people thus: Majeobaje 6; Women 4;
Ogbonis 4; Councilors 4.475
Their suggestion for the number of women to be included in a proposed Finance
Committee was only four, out of a total of 18 members, and disproportionate to the
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number of women that composed the AWU, or that were in Egbaland society. It was in
these and other such contradictory contexts that the aims and democratic components of
the AWU would be continually challenged and undermined. It would involve FRK’s
continued fight to retain the democratic ideals of AWU and women’s issues at the center
of the political agenda in the movements she led till the end of the 50s.
The politics of the AWU in its changing forms would become impacted and
further shaped in important ways by other varieties of local African politics, particularly
by what was becoming more mainstream politics issuing from the ethnopolitical
entrepreneurs and who were seeking who to capture power at the state and national level
from this period onwards. The efforts of FRK to create National Societies in her
movements and political organizations would continue to be undermined by the
discursive practices of the latter within and without her organizations. The potential and
actual divisions and differences within the AWU would also be exploited by the colonial
authorities who were seeking to create a distinction and a wedge between the
“moderates” and the “extremist” at the turn of the 50s. They and the Alake on his return
would seek to buy off some less ideologically motivated and more self-interested
individuals, including women, in the AWU. This would occasion further frictions that
ran deep and split not only the ranks of such old power elites as the Ogbonis but also
women in the AWU into sectional groups.
The women in the AWU were indeed not monolithic and did not remain cohesive,
either. The Alake, on his return to power, and with strong support of colonial officials,
succeeded in fostering divisions among the women in the AWU. This involved his
efforts to buy off some of the women, like Remi Aiyedun, regarded as the Alake’s
stooge, and to promote them to positions of influence that were denied FRK and the other
women who remained loyal to the more democratic goals of the AWU and of the
Nigerian Women’s Union (NWU), a larger body to which the AWU was transformed in
May 1949. The AWU founder, Funlayo Ransome Kuti, would, however, continue to
strive to sustain the vision of inclusiveness of all members of society and of democratic
change in the AWU and in the subsequent organizations that the AWU was transformed
or incorporated into. In the twists and turns of events, FRK would later find herself
organizing a political party, the Commoner People’s Party, formed from the rump of the
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NWU, that not only sought political power at the national level, but would also briefly
ally with the conservative Northern People’s Congress from the North of Nigeria, in the
hope of winning and sharing power at the national level. FRK would later regret that
decision, however, and the alliance did not, understandably, work for her and her
Commoner’s party. However, the enduring goal remained the same for Funlayo
Ransome Kuti: to acquire and use political power for social good.
Other aspects of the AWU and FRK’s movements are examined in subsequent
chapters as relevant. The next section examines the 1948 conjuncture in the Gold Coast.
The Conjuncture of 1948: Revisiting the 1948 Gold Coast Crisis
The Gold Coast crisis of 1948 is examined in this chapter and in this study also
for its symbolic significance in a variety of ways. It has also been a subject of popular
interest and it is not the intention of this study to detail what may already have been done
in previous works. It is the intent of this chapter to revisit and analyze it in the light of
part of the goal of this study in relation to how community and notions of citizenship
were being constituted among colonials and their repositioning vis-à-vis the community,
as well as in the examination of the British officialdom’s category of the “communist”
and its effect on the processes of the period. The crises marked a moment of transition in
which a wide cross-section of social forces in the Gold Coast - workers, ex-servicemen,
farmers, women, school children, the unemployed, etc., began to reimagine their world
and to seek to reposition themselves vis-à-vis the community and to reformulate rights
and belongings.476 Among British officialdom, the 1948 Gold Coast crisis furthered their
renewed thoughts on empire and involved a reconstitution of the terms in which empire
and the nation in British West Africa, including colonial subjects, were being imagined.477
It effected a reconstitution of officialdom’s distinction between the “responsible” African
and the “extremist/communist.”
Furthermore, this study considers the 1948 Gold Coast crisis as a watershed,
affecting subsequent developments not only in the Gold Coast but also in the other
British West African colonies. This position is opposed to that of the school of thought
typified by Dennis Austin, a notable scholar of Gold Coast history in the period under
93
study.478 In his 1978 review of his work, he stated: “I do not believe therefore that 1948
constituted a notable watershed in the general story of decolonization or in the transfer of
power in Ghana (Gold Coast).”479 Others, particularly some colonial officials on the
spot, such as the then Governor of Nigeria, Sir John Macpherson (1947-1954), were also
wary of perceiving the 1948 Gold Coast crisis and the changes that followed it in such
light but for different reasons.480 Macpherson’s and other colonial officials’ concerns
were more to do with how this perception might influence further demands for changes
among their West African colonial subjects, especially among the perceived “extremists”
and “communists” as revealed below. On the other hand, others among the official ranks,
such as Governor Arden Clarke who succeeded Governor Creasy, perceived it as such
and as necessarily so. They attest to the significance of the 1948 Gold Coast crisis
especially in relation to subsequent developments in the Gold Coast. Alfred Alcock,
commenting later in 1975 on what he termed as the “winds of change” in the Gold Coast
before independence, would go as far as to say that:
As a result of the findings and recommendations of a Royal
Commission sent to the Gold Coast by the Labour
government in power in Britain in 1948 to examine the
causes of the riots of that year changes were made in
colonial policy in the ensuing years which began the
movement towards Independence.481
Other studies that have noted the significance of the 1948 Gold Coast crisis in regard to
subsequent developments in British West Africa have not, however, focused on analyzing
or documenting this significance in relation to subsequent developments in this colony
and in the rest of British West African colonies as this study seeks to do. This also
involves the examination and analysis in this study of the significance of the 1948 Gold
Coast crisis in relation to British officialdom’s fear of communism in the colonies and the
effects of this on the process that ended empire and the terms on which it ended.
This study posits that the 1948 Gold Coast crisis led to a dynamic of change,
hinged on new constitutional enactments, that took on a life of its own. It posits that
crises at the level of local African society and changes at the level of the colonial state
impacted each other in complex and contradictory ways and led to unintended
consequences. The report of the Watson Commission of Inquiry that was subsequently
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sent by the Colonial Office to investigate the 1948 Gold Coast crisis and the All-African
Coussey Commission report that followed it had received serious attention in the
Colonial Office. The Watson’s Commission, going outside its terms of reference,
recommended in August 1948 a number of constitutional changes and reforms.482 This
would lead to reforms involving quicker reviews of pre-existing constitutions in all the
four colonies to allow for more “democratic” openings, i.e., more unofficial
representation in the Legislative Councils, etc.
Some colonial officials, such as the Nigerian Governor, Sir John Macpherson,
were indeed aversed to any interpretation of the 1948 Gold Coast crisis that would
elevate it to the level of such significance in relation to subsequent developments or
subsequent official actions in the Gold Coast and in the other British West African
colonies. Macpherson expressed strong concerns about any potential interpretation of the
changes that were being proposed by officialdom following the 1948 Gold Coast crisis as
being the result of the 1948 “disorder.”483 On being advised of the impending proposed
changes following the report of the Watson’s Commission which was signed off at the
Colonial Office, Macpherson shared his misgivings to this effect with A. B. Cohen, the
Assistant Under-Secretary of State (1947-1951). He expressed fear of possible
perceptions by outside opinion and among Africans that the government was caving in to
pressure. He wrote in his reply to Cohen:
My first thought is that it will be assumed here, as well as
in the Gold Coast, that any constitutional advance that
follows upon the proposals of the Commission has been
achieved as a direct result of disorder; this assumption will
do great harm in leading colonial peoples to believe that
advance is more certainly and more speedily achieved by
violence than by constitutional means.484
Macpherson went on to express his concerns to Cohen, that:
Apart from the encouragement given to political extremists
throughout West Africa the proposals in the report will
cause serious misgivings among those in Nigeria
(particularly in the North and West) who wish to see
advance along different lines.485
However, as revealed and documented in this study from available evidence, there is no
doubt as to the influence of the Gold Coast crisis on the British colonial government and
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on the subsequent shifts in British officialdom’s position and the turn of events, not only
in the Gold Coast, but also in the rest of British West African colonies. The crisis played
a central part in beginning to move British officialdom along the path of comparatively
more wide-ranging reforms than had previously been intended and would end in the
unplanned grant of self-government to these colonies, starting with the Gold Coast from
the second half of the 50s.
The study seeks to reveal how British officialdom’s fear of those they perceived
as ‘extremists’ and ‘communists’ and who they believed would (irrespective of their
limited number), make the colonies vulnerable to Soviet Union’s incursions in the
colonies was built in important ways into the dynamic of the process of change at this
time. Fearful images which the 1948 crisis conjured in official mind and linked to their
fear of the “extremists” and “communists,” made concessions by British officialdom to
those they perceived as moderates more necessary. For example, although Cohen,
expressing the general feelings in the Colonial Office, had felt that the recommendations
in the constitutional chapter of the Watson Commission’s report was “rather radical,”486
the Colonial Office still felt compelled to accept the recommendations, even if in broad
terms. In the words of the Secretary of State, Arthur Creech Jones, in the Cabinet
Memorandum he later released in October, 1949 in which he explained the need to accept
the Watson’s and the Coussey’s recommendations along the lines of further constitutional
changes and developments as advised in both:487
If we are not prepared to accept it broadly, moderate
opinion will be alienated and the extremists given an
opportunity of gaining further and weightier support and of
making serious trouble.488
Officialdom felt a strong need to avert “serious trouble” by making concessions to the
“moderates” and not drive them into the ranks of the “extremists.” Developments in the
Gold Coast reveal how from this period onwards British officialdom began to oblige the
“moderates.”489
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The 1948 Gold Coast Crisis
The Gold Coast crisis which began on 28th February, 1948 at the end of Nii Bonne’s
boycott protest movement and ended around March 15th, 1948 with the government’s
declaration of the state of emergency and curfew, incorporated a complex array of
inextricably mixed causes, goals, vision, etc. At the end of it, British officialdom would
seek to separate the “moderates” from the “extremists” and “communists.” In this crisis,
social, economic, political, anti-colonialist, and other goals more particular as well as
broad-based goals were inextricably mixed, and also involved limited as well as longterm goals.490 Its causes and character were multifaceted. It stretched into different
phases, spread throughout urban and rural centers, was both organized and spontaneous,
was rooted in felt grievances and aspirations, etc. In it, the “nation” began to be
imagined in more socially-radical ways among a cross-section of the colony’s social
forces than had been the case. Before then, socially radical imagining of the “nation”
tended to be located among select socialist-oriented colonials and organizations, as
revealed in earlier chapters.
The political and racialist/anti-colonialist component of the disturbances could be
detected in the chantings of the rioters as well as in the involvement of the UGCC led by
Dr. D. Danquah and with Kwame Nkrumah as Secretary of the UGCC. The UGCC
leadership sought to constitute the crisis in nationality terms. The participants in the
disturbances chanted slogans such as: “This is the last European Governor who will
occupy the Castle,” referring to Governor Gerald Creasy, “Go and see the Christiansborg
Road. The Europeans are killing the African ex-servicemen,” etc.491 Some young men
were reported to have told some European observers, “Long Live Our Leaders,” referring
to the six UGCC members that were detained by the government as a result of the
disturbances, while some chanted, “All Foreigners Must Go.”492 Pamphlets found in
circulation in Kumasi on March 17th sounded the same anti-colonial notes. They read:
“Release our political leaders immediately. Lift the ban on our papers at once. Else
GENERAL STRIKE. Give us liberty or give us death,” and was signed, “Working
Classes, Gold Coast.”493 Open references were also made to Burma, India, and Ceylon as
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examples of nations that had freed themselves from foreign domination.494 It was also
aimed directly at European merchants, perceived as agents of the imperial government.
The UGCC’s ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, more or less capitalizing on the
widespread discontent, sought to make the people’s causes their own in their “nationforming” endeavors. Among the causes which the UGCC leaders sought to make their
own was that of the dissident ex-servicemen. The Watson’s Commission Report claimed
that many of the six men detained subsequent to the riot, which included Nkrumah and
Danquah, were active in addressing meetings of the ex-servicemen at a rally before the
fatal procession of the Servicemen Union on 28th February, 1948.495 The Watson’s
Commission Report further commented that the UGCC leadership:
Endeavored to enlist under their banner everyone who had
a public or private grievance against the Government and to
seize upon every complaint, great or small, which might
inflame a population avid for excitement.496
There is no doubt as to the UGCC’s complicity in the riot and of the leadership’s attempt
to make political capital out of the disturbances in their desire for some form of selfgovernment for the Gold Coast. This included their attempt to focus world attention on
the crisis. Evidence presented before the Watson’s Commission, which the UGCC did
not deny having knowledge of,497 revealed a planned strategic move by the UGCC to
communicate with the Secretary of State and the World Press by an already prepared
telegram to the Secretary of State and a distribution list of the telegram to the World
Press, including the New Times of Moscow as soon as the outbreak gained
momentum. 498 No doubt this reflected the strong influence of Nkrumah on the UGCC.
Dr. Danquah, though known to be a moderate, was also seeking to use Nkrumah’s skills
and contacts for UGCC’s ends at this time and would affirm to the Commission that they
“wanted the world to know.”499
Whatever might have been the attempts of Danquah and Nkrumah and other
leadership of the UGCC to use the crises to such advantage, there was no doubt as to the
deep-rooted nature of discontent colony-wide in the Gold Coast at this time, grievances
which fuelled the anti-colonialist discourse and the “nation-forming” project of these
African politicians. At its initial phase, the movement started off in January, 1948 as a
modest and peaceful boycott movement with limited goals, and as predicated on
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economic causes and was led by Nii Bonne, the Gold Coast trading magnate and a Ga
chief who was genuinely concerned with the inflationary trends and the lot of the
common man. It ended in February 1948 when some of its objectives were satisfied.500
But there was no stopping the subsequent spontaneous mass action that followed the
cessation of the boycott movement. The “genie” was out of the box! The outburst of
riots that followed in February 28, 1948 and subsequently in Accra and elsewhere was
testament to seething discontent and felt hardship among the cross-section of the Gold
Coast people, among other causes; the abuse of the terms of settlement of the boycott
movement only provided an occasion for it. The unrest in the Gold Coast from February
28, starting with the march of the Ex-Servicemen Union members to the Governor’s
house at Christianborg to present their grievance petition to the Governor,501 involved
strikes, boycotts, organized and unorganized violent acts, looting of mostly expatriate
firms’ goods, etc. When it ended around March 15, 29 Africans had been killed, 15 nonAfricans wounded but no death among them, and 237 Africans injured.502 The official
estimate of damages to property stood at approximately 1,000.000 British pounds
sterling.503 Widespread discontent many of which were tied in large measures to the
adverse socio-economic consequences of the 1930s Great Depression and of WW II
included: inflation and high cost of living (including the cost of locally produced
foodstuffs), grievances of ex-servicemen who petitioned against major post-war
resettlement problems, and the cutting down of diseased cocoa trees by the government.
But it was also expressive of other causes and visions, including those of the UGCC and
the desire for the grant of self-determination for the Gold Coast colony, etc.504 Although
the UGCC was also indicted indirectly by the Watson Commission of hatching a
communist plot in the course of the crisis, their vision of change in the Gold Coast
society was not socially transforming. The UGCC denied any involvement of a
communist plot that the Commission initially indicted it of.
Perceptions of Communism and the Reconstitution of Officialdom’s Discourse
The 1948 Gold Coast crisis undoubtedly fed into colonial officials’ fear of
communism in the colonies in quite significant ways. The immediate interpretation of
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the Gold Coast governor on the scene, Sir Gerald Creasy, was that it was the work of
“certain extremists and hot-heads,” and “communists,” etc. This was in quite typical
officialdom’s fashion of applying such derogatory labels as substitute for the proper
understanding of the society or the people they governed. 505 Given this official
predisposition, the Gold Coast riots of 1948 became indeed a “shot in the dark” for
colonial officials in the Gold Coast as well as in the Home Office some of who would
acquiesce, to varying degrees, in its characterization as a “communist conspiracy.” At
the outbreak of the riot in 1948, the Gold Coast Governor, Sir Gerald Creasy, exclaimed
in utter dismay in the Gold Coast Legislative Council that he had been “overtaken by
events” because it was so unexpected by the colonial authorities. 506 It was unexpected
because of officialdom’s hitherto failure to take seriously the various discontents in
colonial society of which the protest actions were symptomatic. 507
It is interesting that the Secretary of State under the Labor Government, Mr. J.
Griffiths (1950-1951), would still consider the 1948 Gold Coast crisis a mystery as late as
1951 and long after the Watson’s Commission had provided some valuable insights by
detailing specific grievances that were underlying causes of the riots!508 In his May 1,
1951 address to the Colonial Group of the Royal Empire Society, Griffiths had remarked
that, “Although the Commission of Enquiry under Mr. Aiken Watson, K. C., examined
the question very carefully, the cause of this violent outbreak in a placid and harmonious
colony is still something of a mystery.”509 Part of the problem for him and other officials
was also tied to their idealization of the Gold Coast society, regarded as the “model
colony,” oblivious of the seething discontent beneath the surface. “Placid and
harmonious” the Gold Coast was not, as partly revealed earlier in chapter two in the
crises of the interwar period in the Gold Coast and other colonies.510 Griffiths, trying to
grope for an explanation of the 1948 disturbances, went on: “Economic grievances had
certainly much to do with the riots, but rather because of an over-abundance of money
than of want,”511 still showing a lack of proper understanding of the multifaceted
underlying causes of the riots, including the feelings of alienation and desire for change
among the Gold Coast people.
The 1948 Gold Coast crises may have been a rude awakening from officialdom’s
relative sense of complacency about the colony they governed but the labeling by
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officials would continue in spite of, or rather because it provided some means of
explaining the “inexplicable” to them. The rioting in the Gold Coast was perceived by
colonial officials to have the character of an insurrection and fed their fear of a potential
revolutionary upheaval instigated by communists in their colonies.512 The Governor, Sir
Gerald Creasy, who was witnessing the outbreak of the 1948 Gold Coast disturbances,
cabled the Secretary of State (SOS) in London and spared no efforts in vehemently
voicing out to him real and imagined fears of a society about to go down in bloodshed
unless something urgent and drastic was done from the Home Government to arrest such
a development!513 He suggested that the Secretary of State send a Minister over to
urgently carry out investigation of what was happening and was quite adamant about this,
impressing it on the Secretary of State that the position in the Gold Coast was one of
“potential gravity.”514 The Governor invoked the danger of communist activities,
although there was no real evidence of direct communist involvement or links in the
crises.515 Creasy told Creech-Jones that the connection of the group of detainees arrested
as a result of the disturbances, i.e., Bankole Awoonor-Renner, Kwame Nkrumah, etc.,
with communist parties abroad was clearly demonstrated through the apprehension of a
possible Mr. Burt.516 Mr. Burt was alleged to be an intermediary between the British
Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the UGCC. He further invoked the
danger of developing strong anti-racial feeling, and of the activities of “evil men,”
“extremists,” and “hot heads,” particularly in Sekondi-Takoradi, who “have been trying
to forment real trouble, especially on the Railway.”517 The Governor went on to warn
that if these “hot heads” were to be allowed to get the upper hand there might be further
violent disturbances “the consequences of which elsewhere in the country, in the present
stage of general unsettlement, might well have very serious effects.”518 Creasy was also
fearful of “sympathetic disturbances” breaking out in Nigeria.519
Officialdom could henceforth no longer escape the policy implications of such
social upheavals, what with its suddenness and intensity, and especially with the fear of
“communist” involvement in the outbreak of the crisis in this period. The situation,
Creasy had further urged on the Secretary of State in the same telegram, called for serious
rethinking of the whole basis of their administration in these colonies and a need to make
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radical changes. He wrote, revealing the serious impact of this crisis on British
officialdom:
There is no doubt whatever in my mind that when the
immediate emergency is over we shall have to think very
hard indeed about the whole basis of our administration,
and that we shall have to make some radical changes.520
The Secretary of State, in his reply to Creasy's letter, noted and affirmed Creasy’s
viewpoint:
As regards the future, I note your remark at the end of your
letter that we shall have to think very hard indeed about the
whole basis of our administration and that we shall have to
make some radical changes.521
In regard to Creasy’s allegation of communist involvement, it should be noted
that the fear of communist instigation in the Gold Coast crises as expressed by Creasy
was strongest with Governor Creasy himself. Although Creasy was able to carry the
Colonial Office with him in general in regard to the alleged communist involvement in
the disturbances, the Secretary of State tended to be more guarded. In responding to
Governor Creasy in regard to communist involvement in the crisis, Creech-Jones wrote:
We must clearly endeavor to establish the extent to which
Communist instigation and influence have been responsible
for the course of events. Investigations to that end may
have to be carried forward secretly until a more precise
estimate of true proportion of Communist activities can be
made. 522
Creech-Jones further went on to tell Governor Creasy, in response to Creasy’s telegram,
that he would be glad if Creasy would “telegraph briefly substance of evidence obtained
to prove this connection and nature of indications obtained regarding plan for Union of
African Socialist Republics, etc.,” as Creasy had previously alleged.523 Creech-Jones was
more anxious to await the report of the Commission of Inquiry that was being established
to look into the 1948 Gold Coast crises and was not that ready either to send a Minister to
investigate it as requested by Creasy in his telegram to Creech-Jones.524 Some other
officials in the Colonial Office also expressed certain reservations in regard to possible
communist involvement in this crisis, or of the extent of it. Sir T. Lloyd, the Permanent
Under-Secretary of State (1947–1956), was also doubtful about the reality and/or extent
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of communism in this crisis, contrary to the significance that Creasy was giving to it. In
his response to Cohen’s letter to him in regard to the draft of the Secretary of State’s
reply to Creasy’s telegraph on the Gold Coast crises, Lloyd had expressed that he
personally felt that the Governor - Creasy - was overdoing that aspect, i.e., the communist
scare. He expressed his belief that “the Governor’s present judgment that the trouble was
mainly due to Communists activity likely wrong.”525 However, although not totally sold
on the communist scare as Governor Creasy was, the Secretary of State and the Colonial
Office did not altogether dispense with the possibility of communist influence in the
crises or of communism’s potential pretensions in their colonies. It is not without
significance that the disturbances had broken out also at a time when the Cold War was
well on its way!
The belief in potential communist influence in this and other British West African
colonies did carry enough weight with the Colonial Office for it to become a reference
point in subsequent deliberations on the governance of these West African colonies as
will be indicated in later sections and chapters. Even at this point, the Secretary of State
conferred with Creasy, thus:
With you I am alive to the danger of communist activities
and the necessity of helping the public to a clear
appreciation of the danger as well as method employed.
Consequently this aspect of the matter must have its proper
place in our pronouncements.526
He also agreed with Creasy that:
As regards links with this country, there is no doubt that
direct connection exists between West African National
Secretariat and Gold Coast Convention through Nkrumah
who was General Secretary of WANS527 from its formation
in December 1945.528
He further agreed with Creasy on the links with the Communist Party of Great Britain
through the West African National Secretariat (WANS) of others detained – part of the
“six evil men” - in connection with the riots, such as the WANS chairman, Bankole
Awoonor-Renner, who “is believed to represent W.A.N.S. on Communist Party Africa
Committee,”529 and WANS Vice General Secretary, Bankole Akpata, “who is also known
to be in contact with Africa Committee.”530 Also, although the Secretary of State again
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cautioned that “this should not (repeat not) be taken to imply that activities of WANS are
communist controlled,”531 he nevertheless affirmed that:
Communist support is, however, forthcoming in the form of
advice, political education of individuals, publicity in the
Daily Worker, attendance and speakers at meetings, and
supplies of literature…532
and that:
Any movement such as WANS which seeks to embarrass
the ‘Imperialist’ Powers and to work for Colonial
independence can be assured of the active support of the
Communist Party.533
That was as far as the SOS would go in linking the 1948 crisis with any communist party
support or communist involvement but it was significant enough. There is no doubt that
the fear of communism in these colonies tended to reside more in general with colonial
authorities on the spot in the colonies than in the Colonial Office or the Home
Government. But the Colonial Office was also not unconcerned about communist
influence in the colonies, even if such influence was felt to be indirect, as Creech-Jones
expressed, in terms of its support for colonial independence. The Colonial Office was
concerned enough about it to seek to control African students in Britain from falling into
leftwing/communist influence there as revealed earlier in chapter three. Hakim Adi notes
that between 1946 and 1948, many of the most prominent members in WASU were also
members of the WANS.534 Moreover, the perceptions of officials on the spot like Gerald
Creasy from which the Colonial Office was not immune, combined with those of the
United States Central Intelligence Agency (USCIA) in regard to believed communism’s
exploitation of the stirrings of the Colonial People for self-determination,535 would
continue to weigh heavily on the official mind and to impact the British Cabinet as well.
The Watson’s Commission Report that was produced at the end of the Commission’s
investigation of the 1948 disturbances further buttressed the belief in potential or actual
communist influence in the crises of social order in the colonies.
The Watson Commission’s Report would not dispense with the possible direct
influence of communism in the 1948 Gold Coast disturbances. The very involvement of
Kwame Nkrumah as Secretary of the UGCC, the colony’s main political organization at
the time and which they implicated in the disturbances, made communist influence in the
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crisis a real possibility to them. That is, given what they perceived to be Nkrumah’s past
record and association with militant and communist organizations and from which they
were not ready to absolve him. They were convinced that Nkrumah was a direct source
of communist involvement in the crisis. The members of the Watson’s Commission,
expressing their grave doubts and suspicions of Nkrumah, stated that even though
Nkrumah appeared before them as “the humble and obedient servant of the Convention,”
who had “subordinated his private political convictions to those publicly expressed by his
employers,” they were unable to accept his modest posturing from the internal evidence
about him before them.536 They perceived that, judging from what was the warmth of his
welcome into the UGCC as reflected in the enthusiastic invitation from one member of
the Working Committee to Mr. Nkrumah to “use the organization as his own,” as
recorded in the UGCC Minute Book, he was “occupying the role held by all party
Secretaries in totalitarian institutions, the real position of power.”537 As if presenting the
profile of a revolutionary and of the “communist,” or of the “totalitarian,” they
catalogued Nkrumah’s past records thus, convinced that this Secretary, Mr. Kwame
Nkrumah: with “a very diversified education in the United States and Great Britain and in
both countries appears to have taken a prominent part in all political institutions designed
to promote a forward African policy,” who, while in Britain, “have had Communist
affiliations” and “have become imbued with a Communist ideology which only political
expediency has blurred,” who in London “was identified particularly with the West
African National Secretariat, a body which had for its objects the union of all West
African Colonies and which still exists,” and which “appears to be the precursor of a
Union of West African Soviet Socialist Republics”; this Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, they went
on, “a mass orator among Africans of no mean attainments,” “the one to whom members
of a communist-type secret organization called ‘The Circle’ were required to swear
personal loyalty with disquieting threats in the event of infidelity,”538 and one whose
statement that the Circle document was ‘“a dream’ which he carried around with him for
some years” they disbelieved, and rather believed, “having seen and heard Mr. Nkrumah,
that, given the smallest opportunity, he would quickly translate his ‘dream’ into reality,”
was the same person standing before them!!539
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Nkrumah was further implicated as a source of communist influence in the crisis
and in the colony because of what the Commission alleged was his proposal of a
programme which “is all too familiar to those who have studied the technique of
countries which have fallen the victims of Communist enslavement.”540 The evidence for
this was tied to a working programme presented to the Commission and alleged to have
been circulated just before the disturbances.541 Although the Commission was willing to
concede that the UGCC itself did not approve of communism as such, they felt that “the
Working Committee, fired by Mr. Nkrumah’s enthusiasm and drive, were eager to seize
political power and for the time being were indifferent to the means adopted to attain
it.”542 This was disturbing to the members of the Commission who expressed that:
Although from his evidence it must be plain that Mr.
Nkrumah has not really departed one jot from his avowed
aims for a Union of West African Soviet Socialist
Republics, the Convention has not so far taken any steps to
dissociate themselves from him.543
The implied link with communism in these disturbances, though hinged on the
activities of a few suspected individuals, chief among who was Nkrumah, and to whom
much importance was placed,544 takes on even greater significance in the light of the
world’s geo-politics and the developing post-World War II Cold War rivalry between the
West and the communist East. In Britain’s post-World War II loss of real economic and
world political strength, Africa was still regarded by them as a stronghold of imperial
strength. And as the Western Powers lost certain Eastern European countries to the
communist sphere of influence in the postwar negotiations with the Soviet Union, Britain
had hoped that Africa was beyond the reach of the Kremlin. Though the Secretary of
State was agreed on the possible implication of communism in the 1948 Gold Coast
crises, he had also indicated in his telegram to Creasy that “it is believed that West Africa
is not yet regarded as suitable … for direct Communist activity,”545 adding as it were at
that juncture some dose of realism from the Home Office into official discourse of
communism in British West African colonies. The United States would not, however,
leave things to chance or let Britain and the other Western Powers be complacent about
what the U. S. believed to be the real threat of communism in their colonies. The U. S.
was already warning Western European colonial governments that communist incursions
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into the West’s colonies was an ever present and real danger, especially in the light of
what they perceived to be the dependent territories’ stirrings for self-governance in the
post World War II period.546 The U. S. would see to it that the colonies of Western
European Powers were protected from such “dangerous” influences. The United States
therefore got its Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) involved in helping the Western
European Imperial Powers police their colonial territories, seeking to help them arrest the
forces of “revolution” before they got out of hand and to channel them into more
“desirable directions.”547 A 1948 USCIA Report put the issue, including U. S. selfinterest in the matter, clearly thus:
The growth of nationalism in colonial areas . . . has major
implications for U. S. security, particularly in terms of
possible world conflict with U.S.S.R. This shift of the
dependent areas from the orbit of Colonial Powers not only
weakens the probable European allies of the U. S. but
deprives the U. S. itself of assured access to vital bases and
raw materials in these areas in event of war.548
The U. S. was warning the West to satisfy the aspirations of their dependent
subjects and to take the initiative before denied aspirations and feelings of alienation
make the West’s colonies vulnerable to, or actually fall into communist Soviet’s control
and which was deemed to not augur well for either the West or the U. S. Based on the
waves of radical activism and social upheavals that were being perceived in the West’s
colonies worldwide, the USCIA Report went on to state that “the existence of leftist
elements within them,” their “susceptibility to Soviet penetration,” and the “danger of
shortsighted colonial policies,” will “in the long run cause the Colonial Powers to lose the
very economic and strategic advantages in their dependencies which they are anxious to
retain.”549
The next chapter examines the beginning shifts in British officialdom’s position
tied in part to the crises in the colonies and their fear of the colonies’ vulnerability to
Soviet influence in these conditions of perceived instability. It also examines the shifts in
the social and political practices of some select African politicians such as Kwame
Nkrumah of the Gold Coast and Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria in the light of changing
political fortunes in the colonies.
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Chapter 5
British Officialdom and the Making of the Responsible African: the Interlocuteurs
Valables
Introduction
This chapter seeks to examine further the shifting political boundaries and how
individuals were repositioning themselves vis-à-vis the community in the post-World
War II conjuncture. It seeks to examine in particular the shifts in the discourses of
British officialdom as well as those of some African politicians. The chapter seeks to
explore the making of the category of the “responsible” African, i.e., the “moderates,” by
British officialdom consequent to the 1948 Gold Coast crisis and their beginning
legitimization of this category of colonials. This study posits that the ideological shifts
among the African politicians who officialdom was now reconstituting into the category
of the “moderates” also involved among them the imagining of community and of
citizenship in socially conservative ways, i.e., gendered and closed to popular agendas.
The study further posits that it was this framing of community and notions of citizenship
– the framing that is conceptualized in this study as the master-discourse - that was now
being legitimized by officialdom from this period onwards. Opposed to this was the
framing of the community and citizenship in more popular and inclusive terms – what is
conceptualized in this study as the minority-discourse or supplementary-discourse – the
space for which officialdom as well as African politicians – the ethnopolitical
entrepreneurs – would now seek to close. This chapter seeks to explore the dialectic of
change and the discrepancy between change and change itself.
Among officialdom, the 1948 crisis, followed by other crises in the Gold Coast
and in Nigeria especially, served to revive their fear of social destabilization and of
potential communism’s infiltration into their colonies, especially in the light of British
post-World War II crises and of the Cold War, as noted earlier in chapter four. To make
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their West African empire more secure and to arrest the crises of empire in these
colonies, officialdom embarked on new initiatives involving the grant of new
constitutions and new administrative changes in the colonies. The changes also involved
a beginning reconstitution of officialdom’s African partners. Colonial officials would
eagerly search for those Africans that could work with them to help stabilize empire at
the turn of the 50s. As they did so, previously labeled “agitators,” “extremists,” and
“communists,” such as Kwame Nkrumah of the Gold Coast and Nnamdi Azikiwe of
Nigeria, would become reconstituted in officialdom’s discourse as the “respectable” and
“moderate” Africans. These African politicians also, who in reality did not maintain a
fixed position on the ideological spectrum, in correctly assessing the mood of the times
and eager to obtain power, were also making shifts to reposition themselves on the
ideological center as “moderates” and therefore as “partners worth working with” in this
period.550 This chapter examines the shifts in the position of political “radicals” such as
Azikiwe and Nkrumah in the era of rapid constitutional changes.
The shift to the ideological center among some of these erstwhile “radical”
African politicians was facilitated by the new constitutions enacted for the Gold Coast
(1950), Nigeria (1951), Sierra Leone (1951), and Gambia (1951), and the subsequent
elections which had afforded some of them entry into the colonies’ Legislative and
Executive Councils, and hence to relative positions of political power. They would now
seek to use their position of incumbency to satisfy colonial authorities’ desire to establish
“order” in the colonies, keep communism at bay, and follow the path of constitutionalism
and gradualism while at the same time seeking to consolidate more political power to
themselves. As these African politicians began to prove themselves as “moderates” and
“worth working with,” officialdom also began to oblige them with more timely grant of
new constitutions for greater African participation in government and thus more power
and leverage. A spate of constitutional proposals and enactment would follow from 1950
onwards, about every two years for the Gold Coast and every three years for Nigeria, for
example. These were officialdom’s efforts to effect constitutional changes along
‘ordered’ lines as well as to appease the “moderates” and pre-empt the “radicals,” “unruly
mob,” “demagogues,” “hooligans,” and “communists” from taking control and opening
up the colonies to believed communist influence. One of the major British policy makers
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in the Colonial Office, A. B. Cohen, the Assistant Under-Secretary of State (1947-1951),
in defending these newly-enacted constitutions that would provide for “full participation”
by Africans, commented that “such a constitution provides the best defense against
Communism in West Africa.”551 Cohen further remarked in defense of the reforms and
constitutional changes that were being undertaken at the end of the 40s and beginning of
the 50s consequent to the 1948 Gold Coast crisis that “A sense of responsibility can only
be created by giving responsibility.”552 Also defending the course of reforms and
concession-granting to “moderates” to stave off the “extremists,” the Secretary of State,
Mr. Lyttelton, remarked in a Cabinet Memorandum of February 1952 that “if politics is
the art of what is practicable this course is justified.”553
These changes and the continued crises in the colony would, however, begin to
feed into each other and would lead in unintended ways to unintended consequences and
eventually to what ended as precipitous decolonization. The more the crises, beginning
with the conjuncture of 1948, the more officials endeavored to make changes while
simultaneously putting limits on change; the more officials made concessions that
empowered certain Africans and closed the space to others, the more the crises in
colonial society persisted. A dynamic of crises and change, change and crises ensued
from the late 40s onwards as crises at the level of local African society and changes at the
level of the colonial state began to feed into each other in complex and contradictory
ways. The crises and changes were reinforced by, and reinforcing the inherent
contradictions of the colonial state and of colonial society. Also, to colonial social
radicals, the changes being effected were too little, too late, and were felt not to be
addressing issues of popular concerns; they would strive to push the limits that colonial
officials were attempting to put on change.554 While Nkrumah and Azikiwe and other
African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs were positioned and/or repositioning themselves to
the center or right of center vis-à-vis the community, colonial social radicals were
positioned more to the left of center.
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Turning the Tide
To reiterate, in regard to British officialdom and the warnings from the United
States Central Intelligence Agency (USCIA), they could not disregard those warnings and
the USCIA’s interpretation of the crises in their colonies, given also the importance that
African colonies have come to represent to them consequent to the cessation of World
War II. Subsequent to the 1948 Gold Coast crisis, the Secretary of State for the Colonies,
Arthur Creech-Jones, had agreed with Gerald Creasy on their need to now confront the
issue of rethinking policy in major and possibly radical ways to stem the tide of social
chaos and to meet the threat posed by the “rabid crowd.”555 This would include,
according to Creech-Jones, possible means of securing more representation of the actual
working populations and at the same time more effective contact with them.556 The
Secretary of State had further stated to the Governor of the Gold Coast, in their
communication regarding the 1948 Gold Coast crisis:
I agree with you that it is of paramount importance that you
carry responsible African opinion with you, and that it
should wherever possible be consulted and associated with
your actions.557
Mainstream officialdom would also now become more inclined towards
rethinking and putting into practice the views of a handful of official critics of prevailing
policy, especially that aspect of official policy that had involved official labeling of, and
attacks on African critics of local administration.558 H. Cooper, the Public Relations
Officer (P.R.O.) who was posted to Nigeria in 1947, had called this in various terms as,
i.e., “negative assault on the critics of Government policy,” etc.559 The predisposition of
colonial officials to quickly label protest movements in the colonies or African critics of
colonial administration or social radicals as “extremist” or “communist” had not served
them well. By labeling them so had not allowed for healthy interchange of ideas and
input of more progressive views. They would now seek to rethink this position and to
make strategic shifts consequent to the 1948 Gold Coast crisis.
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Officialdom’s Shifting Discourse and the Rehabilitation of Official Minority Views
The essence of the subsequent beginning shift in Colonial Office thinking in regard to
African critics of colonial administration is captured in the prevailing minority views and
opinions of colonial officials like H. Cooper. Cooper’s communication with other
colonial officials prior to the 1948 crisis was expressive of these dissenting views among
the official class and is examined at some length in the following sections.
Differentiating views like his had pointed to the bankruptcy of prevalent official position
that saw protest movements in the colonies and dissenting local opinions and critics of
colonial administration as dysfunctional.
When Cooper first took over as the P.R.O. in Nigeria in 1947, he was dismayed to
find that the Public Relations Office itself was virtually in “a state of war” with the
NCNC and the Zik Press.560 Cooper, who was most vocal and articulate in critiquing
official policy, had earlier advocated a rethinking of official policy and attitudes towards
African critics of colonial administration and their contesting views in more constructive
ways. “We have suffered a great deal from the prevalent notion that a Nigerian with
progressive views is automatically an outcast,”561 he commented, pointing to his
perceived poverty of prevalent official thinking and policy of dealing with African critics
of colonial government. He had recommended working with, rather than alienating these
African critics, contrary to the views of some other colonial officials or of those who had
worked before him in the Public Relations Office.562 Cooper himself had led the way in
this, putting his beliefs into practice in his position as chairman of the Ikoyi Club in
Nigeria, a position he regarded as potentially of strategic importance. There, he started
the policy of appeasing the ‘progressives’ by encouraging social interaction between
Africans and Europeans, held receptions for Nigerian students returning from overseas,563
etc. “All this, of course,” he remarked, “has meant a great change from the old tactics of
pounding away at the extremists in the hope of driving them out of business.”564 Critics
of Cooper’s position would rather support the denigration of Azikiwe and his colleagues
as done in the London Daily Mail, the London Daily Mirror, and the Nigerian Daily
Times.565 In opposition to his critics’ position, Cooper further commented that “to brand
Zik as a rogue and a traitor merely strengthens his position.”566
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Cooper went on to comment, rightly, that negative assaults on the critics of
government policy, instead of a positive promotion of that policy, “inflates the stature of
the individuals who are attacked and gives them the opportunity to pose as ‘martyrs.”’567
He was right in that these African politicians certainly used the prevalent attacks of
government on them to great advantage. For example, the more colonial officials tried to
denigrade Azikiwe earlier on,568 the more his stature grew, as was the case with Kwame
Nkrumah in the Gold Coast, furthered also by their newspaper activities. Their growing
stature was only challenged in the competition between them and their African political
opponents from various points of the ideological spectrum.569 “Part of the trouble,”
Cooper further opinioned, “is that Zik realizes that he is living in 1947, while too many of
those who condemn him have taken very little account of the passage of time.”570 The
Watson Commission’s remarks on the attitude and outlook of some colonial officials in
the colonies further underscore the failure of some of these colonial officials to be
forward-looking, as pointed out earlier by Cooper. The Commission stated that they had
“equally sought official views among those who by long residence may claim an
understanding denied to those of less experience,” and went on to remark that,
unfortunately, among them, they were:
Oppressed by the feeling that time had stood still. In a
world where change was the keynote there appeared to be a
disposition to let the world go by and to resent the intrusion
of new ideas.571
In regard to the “problem of Zik,” Cooper had suggested to Blackburne that:
The only way to drive him out of business is to display a
more attractive line of goods in our own shop window and
to make it obvious that we are inviting the customers to
come and inspect those goods, instead of requiring them, as
a proof of ‘loyalty,’ to accept them at our own valuation.572
British colonial officials were now ready to put such imaginative endeavors to
work in their West African colonies subsequent to the crisis of 1948 in the Gold Coast
and in the changing circumstances of the late 40s. They were prepared to look for, and to
work with the “progressives,” i.e., the “responsible” Africans - those they perceived at
this time to have the credentials to help them in managing colonial society and in
managing change. The 1948 conjuncture marked an important transition in official mind
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towards rethinking policy and an openness to allow for the incorporation of new African
working partners. It marked a new phase in the “moral rearmament of empire.” With a
preparedness to rethink policy and a somewhat more responsive disposition towards
dissent in the colonies, officials higher up the structure of power now sought to look more
closely at the root cause of dissent in the colonies - starting with the 1948 Gold Coast
crisis. In one of his communication with the Governor of the Gold Coast, the Secretary
of State had indicated a willingness to consider “other reasons for the outbreak which
may have their foundation in sincerely felt cause of dissatisfaction quite unconnected
with Communism.”573 This was indeed suggestive of a welcome shift in official mindset,
at least as regards officialdom’s readiness to consider that there may be genuine causes of
disenchantment that were giving rise to the disturbances and protest movements in the
colonies other than, perhaps, communist instigation!574 But it was not certain how far
officialdom would go in exploring the root of social conflicts or dissent in the colonies
and if the labeling, including that of communist, would cease altogether.
Reconstituting the “Responsible” and the “Irresponsible” African
British colonial authorities’ anti-communist grid in the colonies, predicated also
on the distinction between the “respectable” African on the one hand, and the
“irresponsible” African – i.e., the “communist,” etc. - on the other hand, would prove to
be resilient as their fear of communism in their West African colonies would not go
away. The difference with the shift in their discourse of the respectable and the
irresponsible African at this time was in regard to who would now be invested with the
title of the respectable African and who would remain in the category of the
irresponsible/communist. The policy of appeasement of critics of colonial administration
would be applied, in the twists and turns of events subsequent to the conjuncture of 1948
in the Gold Coast, to those African critics of colonial administration who by the turn of
the 50s were also making the necessary ideological shift to present themselves as
“partners worth working with!”
The rethinking among officialdom would, however, first involve a redefinition of
the progressive and responsible Africans to include those seeking for political
representation and devolution of power through the institutions by which they were
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governed. These were mostly western educated Africans who, till now, the colonial
government had largely shown quite a distaste for in preference for the chiefs who in
reality were becoming more and more ineffective in governance and in containing the
crises of empire. The colonial power, had, till then, continued to prefer and respect the
chiefs even with the awareness of the chiefs’ increasing ineffectiveness as working
partners since the era of the “second colonial occupation” in the 30s, when British
officialdom was trying to reinvent empire.575 This preference for the chiefs was over the
more vocal Western- educated Africans who were clamoring for representative
government in the colonies. British officialdom had, however, continued to only seek
reform of the base of government in ways that still gave important power to the chiefs.576
The 1948 Gold Coast crisis once again demonstrated to colonial officials that
chiefly rule as constituted was ineffective and the Watson’s Commission had buttressed
this fact. The difficulty for colonial officials also lay importantly in the fact that no other
group of colonials had been co-opted to work with them for as long as they did with the
chiefs in the administration of the colony.577 This would become most glaring as they
prepared to hurriedly hand over power in the mid-50s578 to many of these westerneducated African politicians that officialdom was now reconstituting as “moderates.”
Part of the indictment of the Watson’s Commission on the Gold Coast administration had
also included the fact that “the 1946 Constitution did nothing to decentralize the
machinery of government,” and that “only in Native Administration, residing largely in a
hierarchy of vested interest jealously guarded by Chiefs and Elders, was the African
provided with an approach to political expression.”579 It also stated that “there has in the
past, been a lack of coordination in the planning of Gold Coast development.”580 The
report of the Commission had further come down hard on the chiefs and the place left for
traditional interests and regarded the chiefs as being part of the problem of the 1948
crises that must now be confronted in the Gold Coast.581 The vocal Western-educated
elements continued to protest against the shortcomings of the 1946 Constitution and to
make demands for more effective representation in the colonies’ governing institutions.
In the 1948 Gold Coast disturbances, these vocal Africans in that colony who also
comprised the leadership of the UGCC, promoted the agitation for responsible selfgovernment.582
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The colonial government had all along been opposed to such clamorings and
perceived politically radical discourse of the nation by Western-educated Africans here in
the Gold Coast and in the other West African colonies. The distinction would now be
made between the discourse of the nation in politically radical terms and the discourse of
the nation in socially radical terms. Officialdom’s somewhat adversarial position towards
these Western-educated Africans would now begin to shift. Cooper had previously noted
in 1947, in regard to these Western-educated Africans in Nigeria, the “official opposition
to government propaganda by a large number of educated young men who,” in his
opinion, “in this country as elsewhere else, are bound to be the main driving force behind
political movements of the future.” 583 He had expressed his opinion that this group
should be co-opted rather than opposed. He further commented:
It seems to me the worst kind of wishful thinking to pretend
that we can batter this group into dispersal or dissolve the
ardent nationalism which it represents. I have proceeded
from the start on the assumption that the growth of
nationalism in Nigeria is inevitable and natural, and that
our aim must be, not to damn the flood but to divert it into
useful channels.584
H. Cooper’s writings in 1947 provide a window into the understanding of the
subsequent shift in official discourse and position and the distinction that colonial
officials would now be making in their categorization of the “progressive” and
“responsible” Africans, as opposed to the “irresponsible” and “extremist/communist”
Africans.585 In his letter of October 13, 1947 to Mr. K. W. Blackburne in which he
further advised on how to deal with the “malleable fringe” in colonial society, Cooper
had advanced a distinction between the “hard core of opposition” as the extremist
factions, and in whose rank Azikiwe was still included at this time, and the “malleable
fringe,” the “honest and eager young nationalists,” as the progressives.586 He wrote, and I
quote at length:
My estimate of the situation here is rightly as follows.
There is a hard core of opposition which we should
probably be wise to regard as irreconcilable. But that core
derives its influence and importance from the fringe of still
malleable material which surrounds it – that is, from the
honest and eager young nationalists who genuinely believe
that the leadership of Zik and his lieutenants is the best
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available and whose imagination has been caught by the
slogans of the NCNC. Hammer blows against the core will
only bruise and embitter the fringe. The best hope lies in
providing, on our side, imaginative leadership which will
compete with that of Zik and which can, I soberly believe,
draw a great deal of the fringe away from its present
confused allegiance to the extremist factions.587
Although Cooper’s own statements reflect some elements of official bias and labeling, as
well as a negative view of Azikiwe at this time, his more enlightening outlook and
solution to the “problem of Zik” and others involved making the system more responsive
by genuinely identifying and cooperating with those perceived as “progressive” Africans.
He advanced a fine distinction among Africans between those he perceived, including
government’s critics, as seeking for change and representative government in the colonies
and who would be ready to work constructively with the colonial government to achieve
these ends, and those he perceived to be intransigent and extremist and believed by him
to remain as clogs in the wheel of progress. This fine distinction differed from hitherto
official position in that included in Cooper’s category of responsible Africans are those
he termed as the progressives. These were seeking for self-government, for example, but
who Cooper perceived were willing to do so by working with the government for gradual
change through constitutional means and not through extra-institutional means. Till now,
official predisposition had been to collapse all of them into the category of the
“irresponsible.” In other words, the “responsible” Africans were now also the
“progressives,” extracted from among the ranks of those seeking for change and
representative government, including self-government, and who were perceived to be
able to cooperate with colonial officials to stabilize empire at this time in the realization
of perceived mutual goals. The distinction, nevertheless, still left a variety of other
socially relevant interventions in the category of the “irresponsible” and “communist,”
etc. As of the end of the 1940s, Nkrumah’s and Azikiwe’s kind of social intervention,
along with those of grassroot–oriented colonial activists, etc., were still perceived by
colonial officials in the light of the latter, i.e., as “irresponsible” and “communist.”
Cooper’s thinking, the idea of regarding critics of colonial administration in
functional terms and to include from among their ranks those with whom they could work
to realize mutual goals, began to be echoed in the discourses and pronouncements of
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officials higher up the hierarchy of power and to enter mainstream colonial official
discourse consequent to the crises of 1948 in the Gold Coast. In the flurry of
communication between the Secretary of State, Arthur Creech-Jones, and Governor
Gerald Creasy on the occasion of the outbreak of the Gold Coast crises in February 1948,
Creech-Jones had advised Creasy: “it is of paramount importance that you carry
responsible African opinion with you, and that it should wherever possible be consulted
and associated with your actions.”588
The “responsible” Africans, now synonymous in mainstream official discourse
with the ‘progressive’ Africans, are those that officials would now need to seriously
consult and associate their actions with in the new scheme of things in order to provide
the desired stability – and the new legitimacy. These would be mostly from the ranks of
the younger, mostly Western-educated Africans with whom they must deal more
sensitively and more rationally in order to gain and sustain their support. Officialdom
would begin to patronize these Western-educated Africans who began to receive
invitations to tea or cocktails and other social events from the District Officers. Into the
newly created ranks of the “responsibles” would be included in more meaningful ways
the “constitutional gradualists,” i.e., the “moderates,” such as Danquah and the UGCC in
the Gold Coast. The colonial government, previously opposed to any discourse or clamor
for self-government even as late as in the 1948 Gold Coast crises, was now realizing the
value of the distinction between those perceived to want it immediately and by any means
and those who wanted it but were perceived as willing to let it evolve gradually and
constitutionally. The Watson’s Commission had also helped to advance this distinction
by noting that they “have heard at some length the advanced claims of those who press
for change overnight” and “have been careful not to neglect more moderate and
conservative opinion.”589 The Colonial Office was now ready to work with the latter.
Included in the ranks of the latter was now the UGCC, at this time now freed of
Nkrumah’s presence and influence.
Previously, Danquah and his UGCC had been indicted along with Nkrumah and
others by the Watson’s Commission of Enquiry for their involvement in the 1948 crisis
and in the demonstrators’ agitation for self-government.590 However, the distinction
between Danquah and the more militant advocates of representative government and self-
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government that Nkrumah represented then, a distinction which had been inherent all
along, would now begin to be appreciated by the colonial authorities. Engwenyu had
commented that both Danquah and Nkrumah manipulated the riots of 1948 in almost
opposite directions.591 He remarked that “while Nkrumah capitalized on the events to
build the C.P.P., Danquah used the experience as a plea for constitutional gradualism.”592
Danquah would subsequently assert in April, 1948 that total independence for the Gold
Coast was illegal, and expressed his belief and his party’s, the UGCC, position to the
effect that:
Complete self-government or independence was not the
policy of the Convention … It is not even desirable in a
British Colony. I do not know whether it is even lawful for
people to ask for complete independence at once. I do not
think it is permitted. So that we being constitutionally
established body would not advise our followers or our
leaders to ask for complete independence …593
There is no doubt that Danquah and the UGCC had capitalized on the 1948 crises to
expand UGCC’s membership which they actively pursued during this period and which
Danquah did not deny to the Watson’s Commission when it was brought up
there. His strong position statement above could also be interpreted as geared towards
distancing as well as differentiating himself and the UGCC from Nkrumah with whom
there was now an actual falling apart, party-wise and political style-wise.
In regard to the aftermath of the crises and its impact on officialdom, the
distinction was now being made, as stated above, between those like Danquah, now
perceived as the “moderates,” “gradualists,” and the “responsibles,” as partners in
progress,594 as against the “hard core of opposition,” the “irreconcilable,” “irresponsible,”
“extremist,” and the “communist.” The Secretary of State, while indicating the need to
continue to be alive to the “danger of communist activities and the necessity of helping
the public to a clear appreciation of the danger as well as method employed,” had also
cautioned Governor Creasy that:
At the same time [we] must do this in such a way that [we]
do not alienate from [your] Government the sympathy and
goodwill of responsible and educated elements both here
and in Africa who may fear that this factor in the
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disturbances may be used so as to obscure or belittle other
reasons for the outbreak …595
The line of distinction was beginning to be drawn to set apart the “responsible” Africans
who officials may pander to, from the “irresponsibles” and “extremists,” etc., who
officials would continue to oppose, carefully watch, and undermine.596 In the ironic
twists and turns of events, the distinction between the responsible and irresponsible
African would be subject to new understanding and revision in terms of those who
composed these. Hitherto officially labeled “extremists” and “communists,” like
Azikiwe and Nkrumah, who were still locked into this official categorization at this time,
would subsequently be welcomed into the ranks of the “responsible” as they also began
to make the shift towards the center and/or right of center! This development is explored
in later sections below.
The willingness of the Colonial Office to objectively evaluate what may be the
reasons for the 1948 crises and to find solutions, as enunciated by the Secretary of State,
as well as the fine distinction being made in relation to African critics of colonial
administration at this time is indicative of mainstream British officialdom’s opening up –
albeit strategic – and which allowed for a reconfiguration of the category of Africans to
co-opt into the administration of the colony in this period. By the end of 1948, the search
for the responsible Africans, the Interlocuteurs Valables - the “partners worth working
with” - had begun.
In the aftermath of the 1948 Gold Coast crises, the British colonial government
was ready to make government more responsive by confronting the issue of broadening
the base of governance. The Secretary of State, in his 18th March, 1948 memo to Creasy
in response to the crisis, had expressed the hope that the Gold Coast Government would
be “considering possible means of securing more effective representation of the actual
working populations and at the same time more effective contact with them.”597 The
subsequent Watson’s Commission of Inquiry that was set up afterwards to investigate the
causes of the disturbances also drove home the need for more radical598 and quick
changes. The Commission advised on the need to pacify colonial subjects' demand for
representation, fuelled by what was then beginning to be heard in some quarters as the
demand for independence. The Commission reported:
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We are satisfied that in the conditions existing to-day in the
Gold Coast a substantial measure of constitutional reform is
necessary to meet the legitimate aspirations of the
indigenous population599
There is no doubt as to the centrality of the 1948 Gold Coast crisis in the changes
that followed in the Gold Coast and in the rest of the British West African colonies
subsequently. It set into motion a dynamic that this study regards as critical in what
ended as precipitous decolonization in these colonies – the end result of unintended
consequences. The 1948 Gold Coast crises quickened the pace of constitutional changes
in the colonies. Mr. Griffiths, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, who, trying to find
an explanation for the 1948 Gold Crisis as late as 1951 and still regarding it as a
mystery,600 remarked in 1951 that “in any case, what was important about the riots were
their consequences.”601 Though the constitutional changes that followed were meant as
part response to this perceived growing political consciousness, aimed at providing more
“effective representation” for Africans; they were also meant to help the colonial
government retain control of, as well as the initiative in the colonies by creating and
managing change.602
The recommendations of the Watson’s Commission and of the subsequent
Coussey Commission set into motion a review of the 1946 Burns Constitution in the Gold
Coast. The 1946 Burns Constitution was not planned for a review till much later, but the
crisis, and the reports of the Watson’s Commission and Coussey Commission that
followed, it shortened the timetable. Because of the quickening pace of political and
constitutional changes in the Gold Coast, the process of review of the 1946 Richards
Constitution was also begun in Nigeria in 1948,603 with Provisional Conferences held in
Lagos and Onitsha, followed in 1950 by a General Conference held in Ibadan for the
review of the constitution by representatives of the whole country. 604 Governor
Macpherson who was of the opinion that he was already in control of the process of
constitutional review in that colony,605 nevertheless had to admit, in view of the rapid
pace of change going on in the Gold Coast, that they “may have to alter our timetable for
revision of the Constitution.”606 A quick revision of the 1946 Constitution in Nigeria was
set into motion thereafter.
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The significance of the Gold Coast and the centrality of developments and
changes there for the rest of British West Africa is also indicated in the Secretary of
State’s letter to Professor Sir W. Halliday, King’s College, London, during the Colonial
Office’s search earlier on for a “fitting” Chairman of the then proposed Commission of
Enquiry into the 1948 Gold Coast disturbances.607 He wrote:
I regard the enquiry as being one of first-class political
importance. In the Gold Coast very likely lies the key to
our future success in relations between this country and
West Africa and recent events have demonstrated a state of
affairs there which certainly requires urgent
investigation.608
A new constitution was granted to the Gold Coast in 1950, Nigeria in 1951, and Sierra
Leone in 1951. Alfred Alcock, looking back later in 1975 and with the benefit of
hindsight, referring to the recommendations of the Watson’s Commission of Enquiry,
considered the 1948 Gold Crisis as the immediate precipitant towards decolonization.609
The Commission had made some wide-ranging recommendations for constitutional
changes which were adopted. Although Alcock was right in pointing to the significance
of the 1948 crises in the Gold Coast in regard to the changes that followed, these changes
did not, however, automatically “begin the movement towards Independence,” as he
commented. The process that ended in the relinquishing of empire by the British was
facilitated by these changes but the end of empire itself was an unintended result that
occurred in the twists and turns of events that followed and of which the 1948 crisis was
a catalyst.
In spite of the promised changes and openings through the grant of new
constitutions, or perhaps because of them, the crisis in colonial society, especially in the
Gold Coast and Nigeria, would continue. Old crises continued in new dimensions in
various localities and between different colonial social forces as competition among
Africans increased in the light of perceived promises of the new constitutions as much as
because of their limits.610 Tension and crises increased also in the efforts of socially
radical Africans to realize their vision of desired grassroot change in colonial society,
including among some, the immediate grant of self-government - through both
institutional and extra-institutional means.611 Whatever the perceived democratic
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promise of the changes, these were felt by the radicals to be inadequate or circumscribed.
Some of the social radicals were seeking for social change, as opposed to mere political
change, as well as for the grant of immediate self-government.612
Searching for the Interlocuteurs Valables: the Partners Worth Working With
The continued crises in colonial society and British colonial officials’ felt inability to stop
them, coupled with the perceived implication of these crises in regard to feared Soviet
influence in the colonies and against the crises in other parts of British empire furthered
official reckoning on empire and their repositioning.613 In West Africa, the 1948 crisis in
the Gold Coast had underscored this beginning new reckoning and shift, as indicated
above. It also underscored the need for a more sustainable shift from their old “partners
in progress” - the colonial chiefs614 - to new African players. However, the British
colonial authorities’ search for responsible Africans that would help them manage empire
at this time did not take them too far initially in the Gold Coast where this shift began.
The intelligentsia and chiefs in the UGCC, also self-baptized as “responsible
Africans,” had presented themselves as partners worth working with in the immediate
aftermath of the 1948 Gold Coast crises. They had shown their support for the
government and for the state of emergency that was declared afterwards. Danquah also
appealed for constitutional gradualism in the aftermath of the crises, in contrast to the
CPP from among whose ranks the clamor for “self-government now” continued.615 In the
aftermath of another crisis situation in the Gold Coast in January, 1950 involving the
General Strike by the Gold Coast Trade Union Congress and the Positive Action by the
CPP, the “constitutional gradualists” - the UGCC chiefs and intelligentsia - came down
hard again on the CPP and the workers and on behalf of the government and the
propertied class. I. K. Agyeman, in defense of property, asserted that lives and property
were more important to safeguard than the demand for self-government, adding
that “‘no responsible African’ had as yet asked for self-government.”616 The “responsible
Africans” were also self-esteemed “men of property,” the self-described “progressive and
saner groups” and the “sheep,” as opposed to the “wolf,”617 the latter terminology helping
to add to official vocabulary of those that officials did not like!
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But the government could no longer afford to do business as usual, especially
with the chiefs. By the end of the decade and beginning of the 50s the British colonial
authorities could no longer deny the fact that chiefly rule as had been constituted and
reformed had failed and that new players were needed to help sustain empire. This was
made glaring, for instance, in the crises of change in some parts of the Western provinces
of Nigeria in 1949 and in the failure of the colonial chiefs and of colonial officials
themselves to resolve the conflicts. Rather, the crises were abated by the intervention of
new would-be political power incumbents in this region - the younger and westerneducated men who composed the leadership of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa, an ostensibly
Yoruba cultural organization, led by Obafemi Awolowo. Colonial officials were indeed
quite impressed with the way the crises there were resolved by Awolowo and his team. 618
As the crises in their West African colonies deepened, officialdom found itself more and
more in need of such new African “managers” to help them manage the crises of change
and to contain the “rabid crowd.” Colonial officials were, by the turn of the 50s,
particularly worried about labor in the Gold Coast, especially the activities of perceived
labor radicals there, as well as of the spread of radical activities and movements in their
other West African colonies.619
In the Gold Coast, officials had released Nkrumah, the leader of the CPP, from
prison on 12th February, 1951 to the CPP which had, surprisingly to officials, won a
majority of the votes in the February, 1951 first general election following the ratification
of the new constitution in the Gold Coast. Nkrumah and other members of the CPP
leadership were then serving terms in prison for their alleged involvement in the January
1950 campaign of Positive Action. Colonial officials had, however, initially been put in
a dilemma, doubtful of Nkrumah’s ability to work with them if allowed to share power in
the new administration.620 On the other hand, they were also afraid of the consequences
of not releasing him from prison to take office, given the popular support he had among
the CPP constituent members. In the end, the Governor of the Gold Coast, Arden-Clarke,
who had replaced Gerald Creasy in August 1949, reluctantly agreed to release Nkrumah
from prison to take office although he tried to make it seem, in his public statement, as if
it were an act of grace and not the result of public pressure, which it was. He did so by
sabotaging the efforts of the CPP Executive Committee who had approached him to
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release Nkrumah by releasing him ahead of his scheduled meeting with them and thus
taking the credit for his release.621 He later gleefully remarked to A. B. Cohen that “this
took the wind out of their sails and enabled me to claim that the release of these men was
an act of grace and a gesture of goodwill.”622 Lamenting on his need to release Nkrumah
and some of his imprisoned colleagues, he however privately confided to A. B. Cohen
that “the decision, however unpalatable, was in fact inevitable.”623 The Governor,
expressing the fear of potential mass disturbances should he not release Nkrumah and
others from prison to serve as their party’s elected members in the House of Assembly,
wrote: “To have refused to release them would have undoubtedly led to a head-on
collision and would have received little or no support from the U. K. press or
Parliament.”624 Here, as officials had perceived Nkrumah all along, was the
personification of the colonial who they had loathed to have any influence in the affairs
of the colony. This is especially so in the light of how they would like to now remake it,
as opposed to how they perceived Nkrumah and others like him were seeking to reorder
it. But here also was one who had proved to have popular support and perceived to have
the potentials to hold the fabric of Gold Coast society together, if his political will could
be exercised in that direction. Officials obliged and hoped they had made the right
decision - what appeared to be the only right choice for them in the circumstance. And
they would not be disappointed!
As Governor Arden-Clarke watched Nkrumah become elected by the Executive
Council as Leader of Government Business in the House of Assembly and perceived
Nkrumah’s beginning cooperation with him in the Council and in the distribution of
portfolios to the newly-elected ministers, he remarked: “I found Nkrumah very
reasonable and cooperative.”625 He was taking good note of him as someone they might
be able to work with, after all. He had initially expressed some doubt about such
possibility, noting:
I do not yet know what to make of Nkrumah. My first
impressions, for what they are worth, are that he is an
idealist, ready to live up to his ideals, but I have yet to learn
what those ideals really are.626
But, noting Nkrumah’s strengths, he went on:
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He has … considerable personal charm. He is slow to
laugh as he is quick to grasp the political implications of
anything discussed … He has proved he can give
inspiration … A skilful politician, he has, I think, the
makings of a real statesman and this he may become if he
has the strength to resist the bad counsels of the scallywags
by whom he is surrounded.627
It is colonials with such capacity and political will that they were beginning to observe
and hoped for in Nkrumah that they needed and were looking for, shorn of any radical
inclinations. At this time, the distinction was being further made, on the one hand,
between a would-be reformed “radical,” “extremist,” or “communist,” labels that had
hitherto been applied to Nkrumah, and, on the other hand, the “scallywags,” the “die-hard
radicals,” “extremists,” and “communists.” The former were to be included in the ranks
of colonials worth working with and the latter to be denounced and displaced.
The Colonial not Worth Working With: Aminu Kano and British Officialdom
Colonial officials had similarly hoped that such perceived self-reformation as they
believed they were observing in Nkrumah would be the case with another colonial
radical, Aminu Kano of Nigeria. They had believed Aminu Kano was out to change the
essential power structure in the North of Nigeria, the most conservative region of that
country, and which the British would rather preserve in those essential ways. Mr. Knotts,
the British Chief Secretary to the Nigerian government, had told him earlier when he was
invited to meet with him in Kaduna at the end of 1947: “You may be critical of us, but we
really like men like you, who are ahead of your countrymen …we are ready to use your
capacities ….”628 But they would be disappointed as Aminu Kano continued to prove too
set on the path of socially radical reforms for the liking of British colonial authorities
who remained apprehensive of his radicalizing idea of modernity which they believed he
had brought with him from England.629 Aminu Kano’s discourse of community and
notions of citizenship were perceived to be counter-hegemonic and too socially radical
for British officialdom while officialdom would find certain shared commonalities
between theirs and the African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs’ construction of the nation,
constituted in rather socially conservative ways. Officialdom would prefer that these
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“extremists” leave alone “the decent simple peasants.” Aminu Kano, however, remained
uncompromising in his criticism of whatever injustices he perceived in state and society,
challenged any authority, whether it be the emirs or the British colonial authority, saying
“I hated government that sat on people.”630
Aminu Kano tried to be more guarded with his politics of social change in the
North on his return to Nigeria from England, however, while at the same time moving his
radical ideas and agenda along. He returned from England to continue teaching at the
same school where he was teaching before he left, started the Northern Teacher’s
Association (NTA), ostensibly as a professional organization but actually to become the
basis of a political association later on. He kept his Northern roots intact and he also tried
to play the Native Authorities and the British colonial authorities against each other by
exploiting their differences and inconsistencies to achieve his aim wherever possible!
Thus, he got the Emir of his province Bauchi to agree to the proposal from him and other
Bauchi radicals to address the townspeople in Bauchi in protest against the new
Governor, John Macpherson’s, omission of Bauchi from his proposed tour of the North
which was aimed at his getting to know the North on his assumption of office as
Governor of Nigeria.631 By going to the emir instead of the Native Authority police for
permission and by enlisting the support of the emir through pointing at the consequences
for the development of Bauchi of its omission from the Governor’s Northern tour, he was
able to organize what became the first rally in Northern Nigeria. About a thousand
people were assembled in the marketplace and were addressed by Aminu Kano and Sa’ad
Zungur632 who passed resolutions urging the Governor to come to Bauchi to see things
for himself.633 A letter to that effect was sent to the Resident of Bauchi to be forwarded
to the Governor. Feinstein recorded that there were reverberations throughout the North
and that the British officials were shocked that such an unprecedented event could take
place without warning and admonished them and the Emir of Bauchi on account of
this.634
Colonial officials kept a close watch on Aminu Kano’s organizing activities. One
of such means was through district officers like Captain C. D. Money, formerly senior
district officer in Kano, who had been assigned to Kaduna Central headquarters for the
North as a sort of roving political intelligence officer to observe and control
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“questionable activities.”635 On his arrival in Zaria, he invited Aminu Kano who he had
previously asked to spend a weekend at his home in Brighton while Aminu was in
England, to lunch with him. On Aminu’s arrival, he had greeted Aminu, ostensibly
jokingly, with, “How is my friend Stalin, and how is the meeting of the Northern
Nigerian Soviet progressing?”636
The British colonial authorities were in a dilemma and did not know what to do
with Aminu Kano for a long time as he was not amenable to their control. The British
administration’s attitude towards Aminu Kano was also influenced by their awareness
that while he was studying in England he had made extensive connections at the Colonial
Office and with persons of influence, including leftwing British MPs.637 They tried to
chastise him, buy him off, and when all else failed, removed him from his immediate
environment, all in attempts to slow him down and create a break to his radical activism
and to the growth of political activism in the North. Aminu Kano was moving too fast
and too far for them! Governor Macpherson, in reaction to Aminu Kano’s known sharp
criticism of him and of the British government that he represented, had remarked to
Aminu Kano during the surprise meeting638 with him in Kaduna at the end of 1948:
You have indicated that you think we intentionally keep the
North backward, and the North and South divided … that
you want us to go so that your country may have
independence. You’re a man from an important Kano
family, young and full of spirit, but you must realize that
we don’t intentionally prevent changes and keep the
country from progressing.639
Mr. Knotts, following the Governor’s remarks and in similar vein, also told Aminu Kano
that:
You may be critical of us, but we really like men like you,
who are ahead of your countrymen. You have attacked our
misuse of taxes, claiming we are milking Nigeria for
Britain’s advantages; yet we are ready not only to show you
how our funds are spent but to have you participate.640
Mr. Knotts subsequently offered Aminu a choice of positions in the financial section of
the government or the post of editor of the government’s Hausa-language newspaper in
Zaria, both of which he turned down on the excuse that he was fully committed to
continuing in his vocation as a teacher. But he and Sa’adu and others with him in Bauchi
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fully suspected the offer was an attempt to disperse the small group of radical activists in
Bauchi. British officialdom was, however, insistent on removing him from his
environment and from his militant bed-fellows and thereafter offered him another
position in January, 1949 as headmaster of a new teacher training college being built at
Maru in Sokoto province. Aminu did not feel he was in a position to turn down this
offer, based on his excuse for turning down previous offers, and had to accept it.
The British colonial administration could not have found a more remote place and
apparently infertile ground for socially radical activism to send Aminu to than Sokoto, as
Feinstein, his biographer remarked! Sokoto was the most conservative section of a very
conservative North, the seat of Uthman Dan Fodio’s nineteenth century Islamic jihad, the
citadel of Islamic traditional power and religious authority and of its symbol, the Sultan
of Sokoto, to whom all cowered and bowed – except Aminu Kano as it would turn out!
The British felt Aminu Kano would be isolated there but they were also ambivalent about
this, apprehensive that Aminu Kano might also continue to thrive, politically, even in this
“desert” place! To counteract the possibility of this happening, they had showed the
confidential reports they had on him to the Native Authorities and had asked them to
keep a watchful eye on this “potential troublemaker.”641 The Native Authorities, in turn,
rightly wondered why, if he was so disquieting a figure, they would choose to send him
to their province!!642
Having failed to win Aminu Kano over, officialdom would leave him frozen in
their imperial anti-communist grid of the communist, the irresponsible, and the extremist.
Nkrumah, on the other hand, began to enter into the ranks of the respectable in British
officialdom’s categorization of the African at the turn of the 50s. Nkrumah had begun at
this time to show his capacity as a “moderate” and as able to work with colonial
authorities in their remaking of the colonial state. It was now the “scallywags” said to
surround Nkrumah who remained as the “extremist” and the “bad” African! In the ranks
of the scallywags in the Gold Coast would be put the radical trade unionists, leftwing of
CPP, and those seeking social change simultaneously with political change, including
immediate self-government, etc. These also conceived citizenship to involve full
membership of society, denoting civic, political, and social rights. In the Gold Coast,
these included Pobee Biney, Anthony Woode, Turkson-Ocran, etc. The disenchantment
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of the colonial government would now be focused on these, former bed-fellows of
Nkrumah, and other perceived doctrinaire social radicals in the other colonies. Other
erstwhile radicals who, like Nkrumah, had shifted to the ideological center and were now
gaining power – and official respectability – were also distancing themselves from the
“scallywags.”
Notably, at a time when colonial authorities were looking for “responsible and
educated elements” and “African opinion” to carry with them and to ‘be consulted and
associated’ with their actions,643 hitherto officially labeled and denigraded “radicals”
such as Nkrumah and Azikiwe were also making shifts towards the ideological center to
show themselves credible as “partners worth working with,” as earlier noted. At the
beginning of the 50s and with further planned constitutional openings in the colonies,
these African politicians interpreted the mood of the time to necessitate such shifts in
order to take advantage of the openings and to consolidate political power. Having begun
to taste power and with a belief in the possibilities of achieving more power through
further constitutional changes, they decided to stay the course of “moderation” and
accommodation as strategically dictated in this period. Closer examination of these
hitherto “radicals” such as Azikiwe and Nkrumah will reveal that they did not maintain a
fixed position on the ideological spectrum but made shifts consistent with perceived longterm goals.
The following sections examine aspects of the shifts in the discourses and social
and political practices of Azikiwe and Nkrumah and the trajectory of their political career
at this juncture.
The Partners Worth Working With
Nnamdi Azikiwe
As the grant of new constitutions created openings and thus opportunity for political
power and resources for would-be incumbents, Azikiwe’s discourses and practices
began to shift more towards the ideological center. His talk of the “nation” which had
been more politically radical would begin to shift more towards the political center.
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Azikiwe, or Zik as he was popularly referred to by both admirers and foes, including
colonial officials, was a politician of many sides who shifted back and forth on the
ideological spectrum as consistent with his perceived goal of winning power. His
“nation-talk” had been politically radical but was socially conservative, like Nkrumah’s
as well, and unlike that of the Zikist left who tried to open up the space in his NCNC
party for the discourse of the nation and of citizenship in socially radical ways.
Azikiwe showed the militant side of him in the 1930s and 1940s, as revealed in
his political activism and discourses and sharp editorial comments in his newspapers,
principally, the West African Pilot.644 As co-editor of the Morning Post645 with I. T. A.
Wallace-Johnson in the Gold Coast in the 1930s, he revealed himself, with WallaceJohnson, as early as that period, as an outspoken critic of colonial administration and of
colonial rule.646 Azikiwe took many militant stance against certain issues in the colonies
in this period, his militancy declining from the end of the 40s and turn of the 50s as the
prospect of gaining political power was becoming more feasible.
The early Zik was associated with known social radicals in the British West
African colonies such as I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson of Sierra Leone, Michael Imoudu647
and Funlayo Ransome Kuti of Nigeria, and Kobina Sekyi of the Gold Coast whose
“radical ideas were after my own heart,” he reminisced about the latter in his later
writings.648 He also moved with diasporic leftwing Blacks, including the one-time cardcarrying communist like George Padmore.649 In 1947, he toured the country with
Imoudu and FRK, along with other leaders of the NCNC, in protest against the
shortcomings of the 1946 Richards Constitution and was part of the NCNC delegation to
the Colonial Secretary in London later in August 1947 to protest against this
constitution.650 His NCNC presidential address as successor to Herbert Macauley on
May 7, 1947 titled, “Before Us Lies the Open Grave,” was like a “call to arms.” He
proclaimed:
I want you to make it plain to me that you are ready for the
type of militant leadership I envisage – a leadership that
will not accept the crumbs of imperialism in order to
compromise issues … Today, I might be with you, but that
is no guarantee that I would not be prepared to suffer heavy
blows from the enemy; you must be prepared to make
sacrifices in order to guarantee for Nigeria a nobler heritage
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… as from today, under my leadership, you must be
prepared for the worst. 651
It was this perceived militant side of Azikiwe that the equally radical members of
the NCNC were responding to in creating the Zikist movement in 1946.652 However,
although Azikiwe had gained considerable exposure to radical literature and movements,
including communism, when he was a student in the U. S., had attended meetings of the
Council of Peoples Against Imperialism in London in 1949,653 and would at times apply
communist leftwing rhetorics in his political discourses and newspaper articles, he was in
essence a pragmatist and non-doctrinaire and not a communist. This is irrespective of
British colonial authorities’ opinion of him for a long time as an ‘extremist,’ a label that
in official parlance was also readily equated with the category of the agitator and/or
communist and into which they cast many critics of colonial government!
It was such a person that Major Hanns Vischer, formerly Director of Education in
the Northern Provinces of Nigeria, was expecting to see when Azikiwe met with him at
the Colonial Office on one of his visits to England in October, 1934. Azikiwe recorded
in his autobiography how Vischer was surprised to see a different person than who he had
come to believe Azikiwe was. Azikiwe, recalling this visit, said that Vischer:
Confessed that I was not the type of fellow he had expected
to meet; he did not appreciate that I was loyal to the British
Empire. I humorously remarked: “You must have thought
that I was a ‘Bolshie!’”654
Azikiwe’s combined non-doctrinaire radical stance and pragmatism was revealed
quite early on, for example, in the conversation he had with George Padmore, a diasporic
Black and one-time communist member. He said Padmore sought to enlist him in the
plan to start a revolutionary organization for the liberation of Africa, “similar to the
Kuomintang Party” in the communist tradition, but, according to him, he resisted the
attempt.655 Their contrasting views on the idea of social change is telling of Azikiwe’s
more guarded politics of social change. He warned Padmore of the futility of the attempt
at such a revolutionary movement in a society such as his and advocated an “intellectual
revolution” instead.656 Although it is not clear what he meant by his own idea of
intellectual revolution, it certainly was not going to be achieved, in his mind, by turning
colonial society upside down! His philosophy, to the extent that one could be discerned,
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was eclectic at best, typical of many colonial radicals. In a letter he wrote to Herbert
Macauley, the then President of the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) based
in Lagos, in preparation for his return to Nigeria later in 1934, he stated:
I respect the King … I am returning not to stir my people
blindly to mutiny, nor do I wish to inject in them the
proletarian philosophy of Marxism … Nevertheless I am
returning semi-Ghandic, semi-Garveyistic, nonchauvinistic, semi-ethnocentric …657
Though his attempt to self-describe his philosophical viewpoint thus is also not
altogether clear, it is clear that he was not leftwing. Azikiwe was ready to use any
political resource, communist or not, to advantage if he felt able to do so without being
compromised as was his use of two Canadians with communist leanings.658 As recorded
in his interview in London with Scorey, the former editor of Malta Bulletin who was then
a freelance journalist, he made arrangements during his visit to Canada with two young
Canadian journalists to join him in Nigeria to help consolidate his political journalism.659
The report went on to say that Azikiwe did not deny that these two Canadians may be
communists, and that for him, that was the sort of practical assistance he believed
communists could and did offer ‘oppressed Peoples.’660
The pragmatic side of Azikiwe became more pronounced in the later Azikiwe,
towards the close of the 40s and early 50s, consonant with the realities of the time and in
the light of the openings and envisaged possibilities in the new constitutions for acquiring
political power. For example, although Azikiwe was initially opposed to the regionalist
framework in the 1946 Richards Constitution and actively organized against it, including
his participation in the protest delegation to London in 1947 against this and other
features of that constitution, he would change his position later to agree to work with it.
Emergent political competition between him, as leader of the NCNC, and Awolowo, as
leader of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa (i.e., society of descendants of the progenitor,
Oduduwa), and later, the Action Group (AG) party in 1950, dictated, for example,
acceptance of the regionalist framework. His would-be political rivals, in particular
Awolowo and the Yoruba professional and commercial class that made up the leadership
of the Egbe and the AG later, were already beginning to be strengthened by their position
on regionalism as enunciated in their ideology of Yoruba cultural nationalism, i.e., the
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unity of the Yoruba nationalities as precursor to the unity of the Nigerian nation. They
were also beginning to undermine the strong and unrivalled hold of the NCNC in Lagos
and in Southern Nigeria’s politics by drawing the Yorubas away from it. Moreover, the
British were also in support of federalism as the basis of Nigerian unity. By the time the
1946 Richard’s Constitution was being reviewed in 1949/50, Azikiwe had begun to
cooperate and to get into agreement with the basic principle of regionalism. This was
despite the insistence of significant members of the NCNC, in particular the radical wing
of the party, on a unicameral framework for the country, a principle on which the NCNC
had been founded and which Azikiwe himself had till then defended vigorously. Azikiwe
had before then also regarded political parties as sects and had accused Bode Thomas, a
lawyer and budding political star of the Egbe/AG, of Pakistanism.661 His acceptance of
the principle of regionalism made practical sense but it meant, in the context of the
politics of regionalism as practiced by these ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, the making of
categories of “ethnicity,” “nation,” etc., in mutually-exclusive and narrower terms.
Azikiwe’s capacity as a political maverick, or what one observer in the Colonial
Office, Mr. R. E. Webb, head of the Commonwealth Section of the British Information
Service, rightly referred to as his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality,662 stood him well
in his political career and in his quest for political power. This personal trait was clearly
revealed earlier during the 1945 General Strike that rocked the seat of government in
Nigeria. Azikiwe, the fiery journalist and newspaper owner who would become the
leader of the most dominant political movement in Nigeria in the 40s - the NCNC revealed his capacity to simultaneously travel both ends of the ideological spectrum for
political survival! He needed the masses as much as he needed colonial officials’
recognition of him as having the credentials of a leader to help stabilize – or to destabilize
- colonial society. In this strike to which officials were opposed, Azikiwe had tried to
present double images of himself. Even though the strike was ostensibly backed by
Azikiwe and his newspaper had been instrumental in helping to present workers’ causes
by publicizing their grievances,663 he tried to show himself to colonial officials as being
outside the fray. Conversely, he tried to sustain an image among the striking workers of
someone sympathetic to their cause. He strove to reconcile these contrasting modes and
images of himself to his political advantage. With the workers, Azikiwe sought to be
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seen as a radical and as outrightly anti-status quo. In this connection, he propagated the
story that colonial officials were out to assassinate him for his alleged involvement in this
1945 General Strike.664 That was also his excuse for running away from the turbulent
scene to his hometown of Onitsha in the Eastern Provinces of Nigeria. His actual
involvement, however, was not direct and officials knew this well enough.665 It was also
what Azikiwe wanted officials to understand and he appeared to have succeeded in this
political engineering because official response to his assassination story was that he had
nothing to fear but the shadows of his own self, 666 while the workers venerated him. The
Governor of Nigeria at the time, Sir Arthur Richards, commenting later on the
assassination story, remarked that it was an invention, had no foundation whatsoever, and
was mere propaganda ploy by Azikiwe “designed to enhance his position as the
representative of the people and the man who wished to bring them freedom.”667
Azikiwe would do the same with the radical wing of his party, the NCNC, and
with the Zikists,668 when he felt they had become a political baggage to him. He would
identify with the movement for political gains and denounce it out of political
convenience at the point he perceived their radical and somewhat doctrinaire stance to be
embarrassing and costly to his goal of gaining power. Azikiwe was equivocal about the
Zikists many times, acknowledging them tentatively as strategically convenient for him.
While Azikiwe, in his principal organ, the West African Pilot (WAP) newspaper, would
defend the right of the Zikist Movement to pursue its own policy, he would also criticize
the policy severely and disassociate the NCNC from the Zikist activities, disavowing the
militant youth at critical moments. In April 1949, at the Second Annual Convention of
the NCNC, Azikiwe critically observed the conduct of the Zikists in October 1948. He
denounced them and removed them from holding any positions in the executive of the
NCNC party.669 Azikiwe’s action and statement were, no doubt, deeply resented by the
imprisoned Zikist prisoners and their supporters. The Zikist-controlled newspaper, the
African Echo, in turn criticized Azikiwe for having dismissed the militant youths. On
May 13th, 1950, the NCNC pledged itself to restore the identity of the banned Zikist
Movement and to reinstate the banned executive members. But the leaders were again
expelled from the NCNC subsequently. 670
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Azikiwe’s equivocal671 stand and conflicting dealings with the Zikists dramatizes
his political maverick and what made him successful as a politician. Although he was
opposed to the turn towards social radicalism towards the close of the 40s and beginning
of the 50s, spearheaded by the leftwing-oriented labor radicals who had taken over the
leadership of the Zikist movement, when asked about his relationship with the Zikists he
affirmed them, and would admit, “I am in complete sympathy with the movement and I
am proud that my name was considered fit and proper for such veneration.”672 At a later
time in 1950 when it was politically necessary to do so, he denied them publicly. When
challenged in an article in the Daily Times after the Zikist Movement had been outlawed
by the colonial administration673 to “declare publicly [his] relationship with the Zikist
Movement, which the governor in the Executive Council recently declared an ‘unlawful
society,’”674 Azikiwe declared that his nickname (Zik) had been used without his
knowledge or consent by the recently outlawed Zikist Movement.675 He vigorously
denied reports that he himself had been a founder member of the movement or that he
had been a supporter. This was half truth, in that though the movement was the
brainchild of Nwafor Orizu and other Ibo enthusiasts within the NCNC, Azikiwe was
aware of the plan to create it and was gratified by, and in support of the movement.676
That was before he started shifting towards the ideological center and to distance himself
from the Zikists while the radical Zikists were moving more towards left of center.
“Such insinuations are unnecessary provocation, false, and without foundation,”677 he
said. He further went on to comment that:
As to the methods adopted by the Movement to achieve its
ideals, we must concede that any organization is entitled to
any means it considers expedient to attain its goal so long
as it is condoned by the verdict of history.678
Thus, while Azikiwe dissociated himself from the Zikist Movement on the one
hand, he affirmed them again, on the other hand, by validating their radical methods but
from a position of distance from them! Azikiwe needed at least to retain some
connection with the Zikists in case he needed them even at that point of his career to push
the system to the left, should it become necessary, in order to advance his goal of
acquiring political power! The view of Mr. R. E. Webb of the British Information
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Service in the U. S. in regard to the relations between the Zikist Movement and Azikiwe
was quite apt when he commented that:
It is anybody’s guess what Zik’s real attitude to the Zikist
Movement is but we are inclined to the view that he is
prepared to make use of them whenever necessary and will
certainly never formally dissociate himself from their
activities.679
Azikiwe was ready to use the uproar of militant activism which uneased colonial
officials to his advantage by his double positioning, or equivocal stand, with a foot in
both worlds: as one with the understanding and power of control over the radicals and yet
not one of them. He rightly presented himself as someone who understood the nuances
of politics, including the efficacy of radical politics, and who had the skills to radicalize
his considerable constituency and/or tame it, as may be necessary for political survival.
In the era of rapid constitutional changes, he also sought to present himself at the same
time as someone able and willing to work within official parameters to bring about
change and to help establish order in his colony of Nigeria – as opposed to the perceived
intransigency of the radicals and their idea of change.
Elaborating on his assessment of Azikiwe’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality,
Mr. R. E. Webb recorded his impression of Azikiwe on meeting him during Azikiwe’s
visit to his station in the U. S. in 1950, thus:
Dr. Azikiwe was perfectly charming, friendly, and
reasonable throughout his visit and made the best possible
impression on all who met him here. He seemed quite at
home talking to us and gave us no indication of his political
inclinations nor of his motives in visiting the U. S. A. …
He is a good conversationalist and no one seeing him in
circumstances like those pertaining today would have
imagined him as the politician he really is. Perhaps in his
assumption of this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality lies
a good deal of his power and his danger (emphasis
mine).680
Colonial officials had always been quite apprehensive of Azikiwe and remained
unsure of his motives even when he later appeared to be moving into their rank of the
respectable African. Earlier, in August, 1947 they had expressed concern about
Azikiwe’s impending return to Nigeria from his unsuccessful visit with the Secretary of
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State in what they perceived as “a soured frame of mind,” fearing the likelihood that he
“may cause even more trouble in the future than he has done in the past.”681 A
subsequent memo to another officer in the Colonial Office, Mr. Robinson, later in
September, 1947 noted that Azikiwe had threatened civil disobedience and that his Press,
since his interview with the Secretary of State, “has if anything become more abusive and
violent than ever.”682 They have been particularly worried about Azikiwe’s perceived
militant press. Intense discussions were carried out in official circles as to how to cope
with the problem of Zik’s press. 683 Memos were passed back and forth among officials
in the Colonial Office as to how to go about this.684 Suggestions ranged from setting up
private newspapers in West Africa, i.e., British-owned newspapers, as means of
counteracting the effect of local, especially Zikist newspapers, introducing legislation to
control the press,685 to setting up public relations apparatus to “counter
misrepresentations” through propaganda themes,686 and to improving existing press, such
as the recent setting up of a Nigerian Press Club with the Public Relations Officer as the
moving spirit.687 It was further suggested, cynically, to “spoon feed” Nigerian
newspapers “as they had been disposed to,” and “so make use of space which might
otherwise be turned to mischievous ends.”688
Even at the point that colonial officials felt that Azikiwe was beginning to tone
down his rhetorics, they remained worried about him, perhaps in part because of his
noted ambivalence which they believed also made him unpredictable. Cooper’s letter to
Blackburne in April, 1948 had happily noted that:
The tone of the Zik Press had improved considerably and
the “Pilot” and the “Comet” had been surprisingly quiet
over the Gold Coast troubles – much quieter, for instance,
than the “Daily Service.689
Nevertheless, officialdom’s opinion of Azikiwe would remain guarded, understandably.
Colonial officials would not readily shake off their perception of Azikiwe as a militant
and their unease about him would linger on for much longer even when Azikiwe was
well on his way towards cooperation with officialdom.690 The memo from Cooper to
Blackburne on April 13, 1948 had noted that “the signs were all in favor of the
assumption that Zik was veering towards more constitutional channels.”691 Cooper had
also reasoned that the noted change in Azikiwe might be due to a genuine desire on Zik’s
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part to give cooperation a trial. Although Cooper thought this change might be due to
Azikiwe’s embarrassment over the schism developed between him and his chief Yoruba
supporters,692 the important point here is that Azikiwe was being observed to be shifting
towards the path of “moderation.” “The important thing,” Cooper further went on, is
that “we appeared to be moving at last into calmer waters and that there was a good
chance of the new Governor meeting an atmosphere that would deserve to be called
‘auspicious.”’693 However, he could not help but feel that Azikiwe could become a “clog
in the wheel” of the administration at any time and that anything could trigger the
“militant” in him!694
Cooper’s observation was correct to the extent that Azikiwe, like Nkrumah,
would be ready to radicalize his constituencies to push the hands of the colonial
government should the door of opportunity to acquire political power be closed to him.
But as colonial officials were positioning themselves to work with the “moderates” and to
become more responsive to them than they had been in the past, Azikiwe was also set on
the path of giving cooperation a chance, more so as his emerging political opponents
were poised to enjoy the fruits of moderation and cooperation.
Azikiwe’s beginning shift towards accommodation was not, however, so readily
perceived or believed by the colonial authorities. Officials would experience a sort of
cognitive dissonance as they could not readily make the transition in their mind from
what they had come to perceive Azikiwe to be to what they were now beginning to
observe differently.695 Hence, later, when Azikiwe’s name was inadvertently omitted
from the delegation to represent Nigeria at the London Constitutional Conference,
Cooper expressed concern about the omission of Azikiwe’s name and was disappointed
with his office at the fact that Azikiwe was excluded from this delegation. He feared this
could make Azikiwe sour against them. Even in situations where the Colonial Office or
colonial officials had nothing to do with Azikiwe’s exclusion, concern was felt at the
implication of this. In one such situation, Cooper lamented that it would be impossible to
convince “Zik and his friends that government had nothing to do with the conspiracy.” 696
Cooper went on to remark that, “having had the door of Legco more or less slammed in
his face, he may well be on the point of deciding that the way of the extremists is now the
only way open to him.”697
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But Azikiwe did not go “the way of the extremists;” he chose instead to abandon
“the extremists,” his “radical fringe,” time and time again, and to continue on the path of
“moderation.” Azikiwe was in the business of winning. He would change his opposition
on federalism (i.e., regionalism) to accept it as the basis for the future political
development of Nigeria in the light of what would facilitate his goal of acquiring political
power, as stated above. Once he quickly realized that the federalist principle, i.e., the
reservation of residual powers in the region, was there to stay, given the strong preference
for it by the other regional parties and the strong backing it got from the British Colonial
Power,698 he began to waffle on his position on it though his party, the NCNC, still held
firmly to the unitary principle. The 1951 Macpherson Constitution strengthened the
federalist basis of future governing of the country and the 1954 Lyttelton Constitution
would further entrench regional predominance and revenue allocation on regional basis.
By the time the 1951 constitution was being reviewed, Azikiwe had already accepted the
regionalist framework as opposed to the anti-regionalist, unitarian wing of his party
which the social radicals in the party especially firmly held on to. Regionalism as the
basis for national unity was one of the cardinal principles of the Action Group (AG)
party, created in 1950 from the main body of the Egbe and its leadership. It was also on
this principle that the AG was already gaining and consolidating political power in its
own region in the West and continuing to lure Yoruba supporters of the NCNC away
from the latter. It served to strengthen Awolowo and the AG political party. As the 1951
constitutional proposals and actual constitution legitimized power in the region, and as
the AG became the Western regional government party in 1952, many of the staunch
Yoruba supporters of the NCNC began to change their allegiance and to carry with them
considerable constituencies from the NCNC to the AG.699 Its strength there subsequently
began to decline and the NCNC party became limited to only two main constituencies in
the West - Ibadan and Ilesha - and to its own regional base - the Eastern Province.
Azikiwe realized he needed to secure his base among the Ibos, his own nationality
grouping that composed most of the Eastern Region Provinces, if he were not to lose out
altogether, while pursuing the goals of wining constituency among the Yorubas and other
non-Ibo would-be supporters. The AG was also campaigning for votes after its creation
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in 1950 among the non-Ibo minorities in the East, invading its political opponent’s
territory as the NCNC already did with the AG in the West.
The swing of Azikiwe’s party from the principle of unitary government to that of
federalism could be anticipated with the NCNC party delegation to the London
Conference in 1953 which endorsed the principle of regionalism. There, Azikiwe, ahead
of himself and of the party, proclaimed gladly that “Nigeria has been offered selfgovernment on a platter of gold.”700 This shift was subsequently officially made NCNC
party principle at the 5th Annual Convention of the NCNC in January 1954. The unitarist
viewpoint was rejected in favor of the principle of federalism and on October 1954,
Azikiwe was appointed Premier of the Eastern Region based on the regionalist
framework, subsequent to the September – December 1953 Eastern Regional election.701
This led the radicals in his party to complain that the NCNC had abandoned the way of
socialist idealism for bourgeois nationalism.702
Azikiwe’s endorsement of the principle of federalism as the basis of Nigeria’s
unity exemplify the fundamental difference between him and the NCNC/Zikist left. The
radicals criticized the shortcomings of regionalization and its believed adverse effects on
the nation in the terms in which African politicians were perceived to be conceiving and
practicing it. They also criticized the culture of ethnicity that they believed regionalism
was predicated on. They further criticized the negative effects of office on the party
holders of office while Azikiwe and the party leaders in turn continued to expel the
NCNC radicals and critics from office. At the sixth annual convention of the party in
1956, Nduka Eze, an ex-Zikist and a member of the National Executive Committee, was
expelled from the party along with others. Their associates, former Zikist leaders such as
Osita Agwuma and Mokwugo Okoye, were also expelled for circulating a document
titled an “Appeal to the NCNC Convention Delegates.”703 The document, released to the
press, alleged a betrayal of the unitarist, socialist, and democratic principles of the party
by a “monied” group that included the National President and other parliamentary
leaders.704 The radical youths, detailing the abuses of the National President and of the
National Secretary, including the perceived departure of the NCNC from party policy and
the manner in which Azikiwe appeared to have turned his back on them, continued in the
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document (and I quote at length for what it reveals of the formal divorce between him
and the radicals in his party, as well as the differences in their ideological position):
As ministers, the party leaders have shamefully perverted
the policy of the Party and the significant thing about them
is their willing collaboration with Imperialism and the
betrayal and sacrifice of the Party’s forward elements.
Government patronage … has been disposed of in a
questionable manner and membership of Government
boards had depended more on wealth and good connection
rather than intelligence and ability … Social amenities …
have been extended only to favored areas, contrary to party
policy of fair and equal distribution. The open abuses of
the Party … the National Secretary’s blatant misstatements
on party policy or the National President’s published
obloquies against the young men should have earned for
them a disciplinary measure; when the monied dominant
group intrigues against the ineffectual young men … they
were all ‘toeing the party line,’ but when the young men
make any attempt to defend and sustain the ideals and
policy of the Party they are branded as rebels, bevanites,
communists, irresponsibles and anything that suits the
dominant leadership. 705
As some of the allegations above reveal, Azikiwe and the party leadership, now
entrenched in office, were now applying the same labels of the “communist,”
“irresponsibles,” etc., to the radicals in the NCNC as officials once applied to them!
Criticism of Azikiwe by those who had been in his inner circle previously and former
radical bed-fellows such as the ex-Zikists, as well as allegations of others against him
also afford additional insights into Azikiwe’s political character. Though their views
may not altogether be disinterested, they confirm already observed traits about Azikiwe.
Nduka Eze, a very prominent Zikist,706 would comment in his memoirs afterwards that:
We in the Central Committee decided that whether Zik
liked it or not, the struggle would be spearheaded by him
but we miscalculated for we did not know that we were
dealing with someone who was intuitively cleverer than
ourselves ….707
The watchword here is “intuitively cleverer.” Azikiwe was politically astute and
“intuitively clever.” Although his critics were also assessing him from their own valueposition and bias, his own self-assessment would confirm the view of him as intuitively
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cleverer. Azikiwe, in his own words, describing the cunning way he strategically
positioned himself to gain advantage, wrote, “From athletics I learned how to suffer in
silence … how to act as if I was helpless even though I was as powerful as an ox …”708
Also, from the international left and consistent with the assessments of Azikiwe by
radicals in his party like Osita Agwuma, Mokwugo Okoye, and Nduka Eze, were the
London Daily Worker’s editorials, for example, which characterized Azikiwe in various
terms as a “decadent nationalist leader,” etc.
By the beginning of 1950, colonial officials were starting to take Azikiwe a little
more seriously as being ready to follow the path of moderation, i.e., the path of
constitutionalism, even though they would also remain mindful of his potentials to
exploit a different path as he perceived to be in his interest. Referring to a copy of
Azikiwe’s Minority Report on Constitutional Reform prepared by him at the meeting of
the Legislative Council in Enugu in March and April of 1950, the Colonial Office Secret
Document to J. K. Thompson noted that they thought it “reasonable to claim that he is
anxious to use constitutional methods”709 but, it also noted:
On the other hand, we have no doubt that he will always be
ready to profit by violence so long as he is not directly
associated with it. The position is then that Zik himself is
not under any kind of restriction nor for that matter is the
NCNC as such.710
However, colonial officials were ready to begin to ease their concern about Azikiwe at
this time, irrespective of whatever doubts may remain in their mind about him. “As far as
we know there is no reason why it should be thought necessary to impose any kind of
restriction on the liberty of Zik and the NCNC,” the secret document observed.711 Sir
John Macpherson, the Governor of Nigeria, in further validation, also noted by
comparison the methods advocated by the Zikist Movement and the more constitutional
methods of Azikiwe himself.712 Furthermore, the Secretary of State, in his telegram of
27th April, 1950 on Zik to the Colonial Attache in Washington suggested, subject to the
views of the Governor of Nigeria, that he pointed out essential difference between
methods of violent revolution advocated by Zikist Movement and the peaceful
constitutional method freely used by Zik to further the aims of NCNC.713 With the clear
distinction made between him and the “revolutionary” Zikists, British officialdom’s
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“respectable African” was born in Azikiwe, what with the implied endorsement of the
Secretary of State himself!
Officials were correct in their assessment that Azikiwe was ready to use
constitutional methods at this time.714 Azikiwe was also beginning to distance himself
from radical trade unionists and to actually begin to seek to “tame” them now as he began
to gain political power.715 Sklar observed that since 1951, the representation of organized
labor in the NCNC executive had been relatively minor and confined to the conservative
wing of the trade union leadership.716 He further remarked on how in this period,
Azikiwe “had no commitment to the labor leaders and little sympathy for the extremist
element among them.”717 Although it is doubtful that a leftist mass party might have
emerged, as Sklar otherwise believed, he was right when he commented that the ensuing
ineffectual, sectarian radicalism of the isolated labor left might have been averted but for
the fact that the NCNC/NNDP were unwilling to share their leadership with the
laborites.718 “In short,” Sklar summised, “the labor leadership of 1950 was too diffuse
and erratic, and the politicians of the NCNC/NNDP were too obdurately ambitious to
conclude a durable alliance.”719
Azikiwe, on a quest for the acquisition of political power, was a political
maverick who was in politics to win and to achieve precisely that. Anything or forces he
perceived to be in his way of achieving this would have to be removed or sidetracked.
Azikiwe would not maintain a permanent position on the ideological spectrum but
traveled along all points of the spectrum and would shift positions and discourses as
perceived consistent with his goal of winning. If it meant moving to the ideological left,
he would make the shift, using the radical constituencies that comprised his base, or even
European communists, albeit in limited, strategic ways;720 if it meant shifting back to the
center or to the right of center, he would. And if it meant positioning himself on multiple
points of the ideological spectrum, however confusing it may be to the ordinary observer,
he would do so for as long as he achieved his objective of gaining political power. In the
circumstances and changing fortunes of the 50s and with the constitutional changes that
were creating openings for the acquisition of political power, the strategy for winning
dictated location at the political center and that was where Azikiwe was to be found!
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Azikiwe shifted to the center and stayed the course. Azikiwe was, indeed, a politician to
the core!!
Kwame Nkrumah
Kwame Nkrumah was also politically radical but socially conservative. Like Azikiwe in
Nigeria and other select aspirant political incumbents, Kwame Nkrumah of the Gold
Coast was similarly making the necessary shifts in his discourses and actions at the turn
of the 50s that would establish him at the ideological center and serve to facilitate the
rehabilitation of his image in official mind. What served him and others like him well
was their ability not to maintain fixed positions, unlike what remained the radical fringe
of their movement and/or organization. Nkrumah, like Azikiwe and others like them,
moved in and out of position on the ideological spectrum based on what he perceived
served his goals best at particular moments in time.
It is also possible to identify the early Nkrumah and the later Nkrumah. The early
Nkrumah was a radicalized Nkrumah, if one were to trace the trajectory of his career
from the end of his stay in the U. S. where, also like Azikiwe, he had been sufficiently
exposed to, and radicalized by the existing revolutionary fervor of the Black protest
movements and the communist movement. He would bring this radical perspective to
bear on the politics of WASU in London while he was en-route to his home country at
the completion of his studies in the U. S.721 While in London, Nkrumah was positioned
rather left of center in the WASU. There, he tried to use the language and organizational
skills of the communist movement to advantage. He and a handful of leftwing-oriented
radicals in WASU had set up the West African National Congress (WANS) 722 which
facilitated the shift of WASU to more radical politics.723 However, like Azikiwe also,
although exposed to communist revolutionary literature and doctrines, he was not of
communist persuasion and would seek to adapt aspects of communist rhetorics and
organizational strategies to advantage both in London within WASU and in his home
colony of the Gold Coast in the Convention People’s Party (CPP) which he would later
head.
Nkrumah made shifts along the ideological spectrum as consistent with his goals
at particular moments and had a stable center to which he retreated at opportune
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moments. He journeyed to that center on his immediate return to the Gold Coast as he
made himself an attractive candidate for the secretaryship of the more moderate United
Gold Coast Convention (UGCC). He was moderate when he needed to be, although the
Watson Commission found it hard to believe in 1948 that he was truly “the humble and
obedient servant of the Convention” who had subordinated his private political
conviction to those publicly expressed by his employers!724 They were wrong in that
Nkrumah was able to make the shift towards accommodation or moderation when
necessary but correct in that he would not sacrifice his long-term political agenda or goals
to remain tied to any organization or position if that agenda or goals were better served
otherwise, i.e., by a shift to militancy in this particular case. Indeed, his reputation as a
skilful speaker and radical activist was also what had made him attractive to the
leadership of the UGCC who were looking for such articulate and charismatic leadership
and they used his star quality to increase membership of their organization. As the
Watson Commission remarked, soon after Nkrumah’s arrival in the Gold Coast as the
UGCC Secretary, the UGCC “held meetings in the towns at which according to the local
press Mr. Nkrumah became the star attraction.”725 At the time they employed Nkrumah
as Secretary, the UGCC leaders had hoped they would be able to moderate his radical
propensities at the same time as they hoped to reap political dividends from his political
style and charisma. But Nkrumah would prove to be no party’s hidden agenda, especially
one that may not necessarily advance his own political ambition of gaining power.
Nkrumah did not long survive in the UGCC which was caught in the
contradictions of its own making. They wanted someone, the kind of Secretary who
would help to advance their goals more effectively but not one that would take the
momentum away from the rest of the leadership and radically change the UGCC’s
agenda or engage in what they were perceiving to be the politics of confrontation with
colonial authorities. The very attributes and skills that made Nkrumah attractive to them
as a candidate for the post of Secretaryship of the UGCC also became what the UGCC
officials came to fear as threatening to the stability and more modest politics of the
UGCC. They thought they could keep Nkrumah under their control but they were not so
sure anymore once he got on board! He was becoming the bull in the china store! His
use of the suggestive revolutionary rhetoric of comrade and his continued connection
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with the WANS bothered the UGCC.726 They remained suspicious of him, and more so
of the role they came to believe he played in the 1948 disturbances in the Gold Coast
colony. In August 1948, after the Gold Coast Crises, Nkrumah was suspended from the
post of Secretaryship of the UGCC.727
Nkrumah had shifted to the center to gain strategic entry into the most viable
political organization in the colony at the time - the UGCC - and had tried to make the
leadership feel more comfortable with him initially, but long enough, however, to survive
in the organization till his perceived more opportune moment came. And, at the right
time, consistent with the mood of the time, Nkrumah left the UGCC altogether on 31st
July, 1949 to head a more grassroot-oriented political movement, the Convention
People’s Party (CPP), composed of a cross-section of Gold Coast people, along with
trade unionists, particularly the radical wing of Gold Coast labor. But Nkrumah in the
CPP was no revolutionary leader either even though his fiery rhetorics at particular
moments may tend to invest him with such credentials. The 1948 disturbances and the
1950 Positive Action Strike in the Gold Coast for which the colonial government held
him and a handful of others accountable were more the spontaneous outburst of an
aggrieved population, although the role of his press, the Evening News, cannot be
underestimated.
In the January 1950 Positive Action by the CPP, Nkrumah had, in fact, tried to
stop the planned action from being carried out when the Acting Colonial Secretary, Sir R.
Saloway, remonstrated with him against it. Saloway had believed that Nkrumah would
help to stop it from being carried out, based on what he believed were the signals he had
received from Nkrumah. But Nkrumah’s signals to both officials and to the CPP wouldbe participants of the Positive Action were contradictory, at best ambiguous, and capable
of different interpretations!
Nkrumah, like Azikiwe, was a political maverick. Like Azikiwe in the Nigerian
1945 General Strike, Nkrumah had one foot in the world of officialdom and another
among his CPP constituency in the Gold Coast. Saloway was able to convince himself,
perhaps wishfully, on account of his meeting with Nkrumah and the CPP Executive, that
the planned Positive Action had been called off. He therefore went publicly with the
announcement to that effect, saying:
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I am happy to be able to tell you … that wise counsels have
now prevailed and the threat of the Positive Action has now
been removed … I am sure that all whose hearts are set on
ordered progress in the Gold Coast will have heard this
statement with relief and satisfaction.728
But he was mistaken as the Positive Action went ahead anyway! Not even Nkrumah
could have succeeded in stopping the momentum that was already built up for it, what
with the beginning of the General Strike action of the Gold Coast Trade Union Congress
earlier in January 1950, which, though apparently separate from it, was inextricably also
tied up with it. The CPP leadership under Nkrumah totally lost control of the masses
during the crisis while the latter were more responsive to the TUC in terms of leadership
and direction. As the newly-appointed Governor to the Gold Coast, Sir Arden-Clarke,
would later comment in regard to the spontaneous and popular outbreak of the Positive
Action and the ineffectual effort, if any, of Nkrumah and the CPP leadership to stop it,
“the tail wagged the dog.”729 He believed that some of the party leaders would have
preferred not to resort to the Positive Action but that they found themselves “enmeshed in
the coils of their own propaganda” and as such, the Positive Action was duly declared in
January 1950.730
Nkrumah, like Azikiwe, was interested in winning and in capturing power, and,
able to better read the times, “changed character”731 at crucial moments to try and achieve
success. One of his old “comrades,” Peter Abrahams, assessing Nkrumah later, said:
“We were concerned with ideas, with the enunciation of principles. He was concerned
with one thing only, getting power and getting it quickly.”732 Nkrumah might also have
been concerned with ideas but unlike some of them, he was not doctrinaire. Like
Azikiwe, his approach was more pragmatic. His dictum, “Seek ye first the political
kingdom and all other things will be added,” truly moved his politics.
The shifts in Nkrumah’s position, to the point of becoming officialdom’s watchdog and
“hatchetman” against the “communists” – especially his former “comrades” - in the Gold
Coast are further explored below and in chapter eight.
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Officialdom’s Right Hand of Fellowship
As these erstwhile ardent critics of colonial administration began to move towards
accommodation, or, the paths of “constitutionalism,” colonial officials also continued to
take serious note of them and their potentials as possible players in the task of stabilizing
empire, especially at a time when the crises of empire seemed to be taking on new life.
In summarizing the new Gold Coast constitution of 1950 and referring to the current
situation in the Gold Coast in his May 1, 1951 address to the Colonial Group of the Royal
Empire Society, the Secretary of State, Mr. Griffiths, remarked that, “Recently the C.P.P.
have sought to realize their political aims in a constitutional manner.”733 Also, remarking
on the demeanor of CPP officials in office, he said: “They had the courage to accept, and
are carrying in a most responsible manner, the heavy burden of office in the new
Government, in which they hold six out of eight African seats.”734 He further remarked
that the CPP had openly stated that they regarded the present constitution as a first step
but were willing to work with it.735 This pleased officials, although Griffith cautioned
that it was too early to tell.736 Assessing the situation later in 1952 and with a willingness
towards making further changes to the Gold Coast constitution as concessions to some of
Nkrumah’s demands, the new Secretary of State, Mr. O. Lyttelton, remarked on the
beginning effectiveness of Nkrumah thus: “Dr. Nkrumah and the Executive Council
recently showed some signs of being run off their feet by the back benchers of the party,
though they now appear to have regained control.”737 In Nigeria, Governor Macpherson
also remarked in his memo to Lyttelton that the two Southern parties, the NCNC and the
AG political parties, had both “decided to try out the new Constitution,” quipping that
“responsibility has a sobering effect.”738 He further remarked, in regard to the NCNC
majority party in the Eastern House of Assembly that, “the majority party gives hopes of
being reasonably responsible,” and that, “at least they have excluded from consideration
for Ministerial posts the wildest and least worthy of their number,”739 referring to the
social radicals in the NCNC. In regard to the AG majority party in the West of Nigeria,
he remarked that “The Action Group in the West … want to make the Constitution a
success.”740
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The “partners worth working with” were also proving their worth in other ways.
In the protracted struggle and crisis of social order in Iperu and Ogere division in
Western Region of Nigeria at the end of 1949 and beginning of 1950, the Awolowo-led
Yoruba-based organization, Egbe Omo Oduduwa (EOO), later transformed into the
Action Group political party in 1950, had got themselves involved as peace brokers
seeking to bring a successful resolution to the conflicts and managed to have done so, as
earlier indicated.741 The ability of the EOO to arrest the crisis in this particular occasion
was even more significant in the light of the fact that colonial officials had tried
previously to bring a successful resolution to the conflicts but had failed, as earlier
indicated. It further commended Awolowo, who was at the forefront of this peace
initiative, along with his EOO organization, to colonial officials. Later, the Governor
could not help but express his pleasure at the “very satisfactory outcome” of the efforts of
the Peace Mission at the end of his letter to the Secretary of State. He noted that it gave
reason to hope that the difficult problems of the Western Provinces in the sphere of local
government can be resolved in a spirit of cooperation and goodwill.742
Awolowo was able to achieve a double objective. He was able to use the
occasion and its apparent success to demonstrate his ability to help resolve the
conflicts743 which were bedeviling local government administration more so at this time.
He was also able to show the viability of a political organization based on the unity of the
Yorubas. Although the conflict was resolved at this time, and as Awolowo also rightly
stated, through the combined efforts of the widely respected Oni of Ife, regarded as father
of all the Yoruba chiefs,744 the Alafin of Oyo, and members of the Egbe under Awolowo,
Awolowo’s stature as the chief player was increased in the eyes of colonial officials.
Awolowo, who indeed had been very actively involved in the reconciliation process both
before and after the Peace Mission, tried to downplay the significance of his role and of
the Egbe in the resolution of this conflict but colonial officials were not taken in by his
attempt to appear modest. The Governor of Nigeria remarked that “Awolowo …
performing one of his inimitable mental somersaults, told the Majeobaje leaders that the
honor of settlement should be given to the four Obas, the traditional Yoruba leaders, and
other members of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa delegation.”745 The Governor went on:
“This, he stressed, would prove that the Yorubas were capable of settling their own
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differences in spite of opposition by the Administration and efforts by them to settle the
matter.”746 And that was a critical point that Awolowo also wanted to get out to the
administration as well in involving the Egbe to help resolve the conflict and he succeeded
very well in doing so for that message was not lost on the administration at all.
The ability of the new African players to help arrest the upheavals in local African
society, especially where colonial officials themselves had been incapable of doing so,
must have served to also facilitate official determination to continue to give them more
leverage and to make political concessions to them even in cases where they would have
opposed or overruled them. One of such instances occurred in the 1953-55 crisis in
another Yoruba province in the Western Region of Nigeria - Oyo. The resistance of the
Alafin of Oyo, Oba Adeyemi, to the Action Group’s (AG) attempt to capture the base of
his power747 brought him into conflict with the AG which now controlled the Western
Regional Local Government Council. The 1952 Western Regional Local Government
Ordinance had set up the Council as means of effecting partial democratization of the
Oyo Native Authority. But the Alafin was resistant to this and to the exercise of the
powers of the Counselors elected under this ordinance who were mainly Action Group
supporters. In September, 1954 disputes flared into rioting between the Action Group
party supporters and the Alafin supporters.748 The Alafin was subsequently removed as
president of the Oyo Native Authority by the AG Western Regional Government which
advised him to go on exile to Ilorin.
The colonial administration felt unable to change the decision of the AG
government to send the Alafin on exile, in spite of the advice of the Commission of
Inquiry that was set up after the disturbances under the Senior Crown Council, Mr. D.
Lloyd, to the contrary. The Report had advised against the exiling of the Alafin. The
governor of Nigeria wrote that he did not feel justified in acting contrary to his ministers’
(AG ministers) advice though, he said, he could have done so under Clause 8(2) of the
Royal Instructions in cases where he considered it expedient “in the interest of public
faith, public order or good government.”749 The Western Region Ministers were bent on
rejecting the Report of the Commission of Inquiry and were insistent on deposing the
Alafin and not publish the report. Though the Governor felt persuaded otherwise, he was
still willing to go along with the AG Ministers’ decisions and advised the Secretary of
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State to also go along with his own decision in support of the AG’s action against the
Alafin.750 The governor did not feel it necessary, based on the Alafin’s own poor record
anyway, according to him, to go against the wishes of the Ministers and to force an
“acute constitutional crisis with the Ministers.”751 This was more so in the case of a chief
who, in the assessment of the Governor and colonial officials, “is old and reactionary”
and “has proved unable to adjust himself to modern conditions.”752 Worse still, as the
governor confessed, the Alafin “has long been an anxiety to the administration!”753
Officialdom was ready to work with such new African mangers as the AG
leaders, etc., and to concede more powers to them as they helped to manage empire and
to arrest the crises in their colonies. In Sierra Leone, after the series of riots in 1956, for
example, a high SLPP official reported that Dr. Margai, the leader of the SLPP, was told
that before there could be any further constitutional advances there he had to show that he
had the confidence of the country by clamping down on the riots and by winning the
forthcoming District Council elections.754 On the other hand, another partner worth
working with would be commended for his ability to help manage empire in helping to
resolve some crucial issues that could have led to conflicts and impasse. The Secretary to
the Government, Mr. Foot, referring to Azikiwe’s success in breaking the deadlock
between the North and South on the question of representation at the Center in the two
Houses in the Central Legislature, was happy to remark that:
Our feeling is that a man like this has some worth, and we
would suggest that you should make this plain as far as you
can, being careful, of course, to make it quite clear that Zik
is in no sense a stooge of Government. … There may be
some danger that it would appear that he had gone over to
the Government side.755
If Azikiwe had not gone over to the Government side, he had definitely positioned
himself well on the path of enhancing his political fortunes.
As these new African players were gaining further entry into the institutions of
power, colonial officials would also continue to watch for further signs of cooperation
from them - these “radicals” of yesterday turned cooperationists of today - as they sought
to develop more confidence in them. And officialdom continued to be pleased at what
they were observing from this time onwards. As early as June 1951, in the preparatory
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talks that Nkrumah had with Mr. Griffiths of the Colonial Office before his meeting with
the Secretary of State, Cohen, who was present at one of the two long talks with Mr.
Griffiths, had remarked afterwards that he regarded Nkrumah’s visit as a “great success,”
and the outcome of the talks as “satisfactory.”756 Cohen also gladly noted in his memo of
20 November, 1951 that “it is significant that Moscow has written off Dr. Nkrumah as a
bourgeois politician.”757 It must have been reassuring to officialdom to learn that
Moscow had written Nkrumah off as Moscow’s reject of the “decadent nationalist leader”
was true testament of the latter’s credentials as the West’s “partners worth working
with!” Did not the classic communist doctrine theorize these “nationalist/bourgeois
politicians” as sold out to the imperialists and unsuitable to carry out “the revolution” in
the colonies?! By 1952, the Secretary of State felt certain that the Governor of the Gold
Coast, Arden-Clarke, with whom he was impressed as “one of the aces in the Colonial
Office pack,”758 “has obtained a great personal hold over Dr. Nkrumah and the African
Ministers.”759 That was exactly how officialdom would like to have it. Nkrumah and the
CPP Ministers also had their own agenda and would allow this apparent “hold” while
they pushed from within for constitutional advance as against the push from without by
the officially labeled “extremists,” believed to have “a lust for personal power,” but
“have at present lost much of their power,” 760 according to official estimate of the
“extremists”!
The interests of both officialdom and those of the “moderate” African politicians
were beginning to coincide more and more and as the “extremists” were alienated further
and further. The former would prove to be able partners. In fact, Azikiwe and Nkrumah
would prove to be more able partners than colonial officials had imagined! They
cooperated with colonial officials in clamping down on suspected “communists,”
removing these from leadership positions and actual membership in the political parties
they led – the NCNC and the CPP – what were now becoming mainstream political
parties. Azikiwe removed Zikists like Mokwugo Okoye, Nduka Eze, and Osita Agwuma
from the NCNC, and Nkrumah likewise removed from the CPP and from his government
officially labeled “communists” like the labor radicals Pobee Biney and Anthony Woode,
all of who sought to sustain the discourse of social change and of the nation and
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citizenship in socially radical and mutually-inclusive terms and at the center of national
agenda.761
The Idea of Change and Change Itself
A central concern of colonial officials by the end of the 40s and beginning of the
50s was the stabilization of colonial society, in view of the recurring crises, and efforts at
political reforms in the colonies through constitutional changes were more or less tied to
this objective. Reiterating this commitment against any impression that might be given
that the British might be influenced by France or South Africa to slow down the pace of
reforms, Andrew B. Cohen, head of the African branch of the Colonial Office, affirmed:
We are in fact committed to our present policy by statement
from both political parties in this country and the facts of
the situation in West Africa itself (emphasis mine) make it
necessary that we should adhere to that policy.762
The crises in the colonies necessitated official response and changes in order to seriously
address them at this time, given the lessons learnt from the 1948 Gold Coast crisis. The
dissatisfaction with the many aspects of the 1946/47 Constitutions in many of the
colonies,763 and which the Watson’s Commission Report also regarded as part of the root
cause of the Gold Coast crises of 1948,764 led to a spate of constitutional reviews in all
the colonies. In the honest opinion of the Watson’s Commission of Inquiry, “the 1946
Constitution was outmoded at birth.”765 The Commission commented that:
The concession of an African elected majority in the
Legislature, in the absence of any real political power,
provided no outlet for a people eagerly emerging into
political consciousness. On the other hand it provided a
powerful stimulant for intelligent discontent. The real and
effective political government remained in the hands of the
Executive Council. Composed of an ex officio and
nominated members it was the instrument of power.766
The eventual grant of new constitutions to the Gold Coast (1950), Nigeria (1951), Sierra
Leone (1951), and Gambia (1951) was officialdom’s attempt to seriously meet some of
these challenges. Colonial officials had believed that the new 1950/1951 Constitutions
would take care of the felt shortcomings of the previous ones and would satisfy the
demands of the “moderates” who they believed would work with them for gradual
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change. Cohen had also believed that the CPP, which won a resounding victory at the
last election, was finding that the country was not ready for substantial advance in the
immediate future, 767 although it is not clear what Cohen premised that belief on.
The new constitutions granted to the colonies at the beginning of the 50s,
however, proved to be further causes of conflicts and crises, creating demands for further
and radical changes. Those clamoring for change beyond the limits of what officials
would allow and through means that officials disapproved of were dismissed as
“extremist.” Cohen would further remark, in regard to the CPP and the party leaders that
were now in government and believed to be working cooperatively with the colonial
authorities, that:
The leaders of this party will be pressed by their own
extremists and by their opponents to demand further
advances but if full confidence can be maintained
between them and the Gold Coast Government, as well as
H. M. Government, it may well be that they will be
satisfied with a slower pace.768
There were indeed various voices seeking for further constitutional changes.
Among these were the radicals, those seeking for social change, such as the Northern
Element Progressive Union (NEPU)769 in the North of Nigeria, Funlayo Ransome
(Anikulapo) Kuti and her Nigerian Women’s Union in the South of Nigeria, some
leftwing-oriented labor radicals in all the colonies, etc. These various social forces
continued to contest the limits put on change in the new constitutions and to push the
boundaries of change. They sought to take the limits off change and to resolve
fundamental social issues in the course of resolving political issues.
Though the new constitutions marked an advance on the previous ones in certain
ways, there was a genuine basis for continued discontent as colonial officials had
embarked on the process of creating change while at the same time putting breaks on
change. Officialdom tried to control change and to legitimize the discourse that they
wanted privileged by setting the parameters of change, what discourses were allowed,
and which colonials were included or excluded from participation in the constitutional
review process. This involved officialdom’s efforts at largely pre-setting the agendas for
constitutional reviews and the structuring of the discourse in ways that constrained
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against other modes of discourse and agendas. In Nigeria, for example, Governor
Macpherson, in moving the resolution to establish a Select Committee of the Legislative
Council to make recommendations for the review the 1946 Richards Constitution, said, in
regard to the methods to be employed for reviewing the constitutions, that they should
“make a statement of the principal questions to be decided regarding constitutional
changes,”770 stating that:
A simple statement of the main questions to be decided
would be of great assistance to Provincial Committees and
others who at the moment may have a very hazy
idea of what the questions at issues are.771
Although it is helpful to be able to propose issues or questions to be discussed as
guidelines, this was to be done by the committee of a body - i.e., the Legislative Council that had already been claimed by significant sections of colonial society as
unrepresentative and which had more or less been a rubber stamp for officialdom’s
decisions. Even the government’s own commissioned body, the 1948 Watson’s
Commission of Inquiry, criticized the Legislative Councils in the colonies as such. In
preparing for review of the 1946/47 constitutions, colonial officials were setting the
parameters ahead of the review committees of what should be discussed in the
committees to allow space for only the discourse officials approved of. The questions at
issue were questions officials wanted raised as opposed to questions or issues which they
were not ready to confront. Andrew Cohen had let the governor of Nigeria know ahead
of time what the Secretary of State's predisposition was in regard to the way the
constitutional review should proceed. It was the Secretary of State's understanding, he
said, that the review would “involve only various points in the constitution with a view to
its improvement and development and not a complete re-writing of the constitution.”772
But many voices in the colonies - in Nigeria and the Gold Coast, as well as in Sierra
Leone – were demanding more than just official tweaking around the edges of the 194647 Constitutions. They were demanding radical and fundamental changes. One of the
participants of the constitutional review conferences, Eyo Ita,773 got so disenchanted with
the narrowness of the issues discussed – or lack of proposal for substantive changes – that
he produced a comprehensive statement of fundamental issues at stake for the nation and
for full-fledged citizenship. His Minority Report is examined a little further below
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because of the insights it provides into the shortcomings of the new constitutions being
proposed and enacted at this time and of the possibilities for more wide-ranging changes
that were closed off in the mainstream review committees and review process.
Officialdom’s notion of change involved an exercise by the state of its power to
decide how colonials would be represented and by which type of colonials. By
attempting, for example, to control who got to participate in constitutional review
committees and by structuring the agendas for change, officialdom embarked on the
process of managing change. On paper, the process of constitutional reviews did promise
to be a more democratic one, ostensibly involving consultation from the grassroot level.
In Nigeria, for example, officialdom’s preference for a special committee composed of
members of the Legislative Council with power to co-opt others for the review of the
1947 Richard Constitution was dropped later in 1949, at the Chief Commissioners'
Conference, in favor of one that would appear to link up more directly with the people.774
This was done in order to weaken the grounds of opposition anticipated from Westerneducated Africans such as those, for example, in the NCNC or in the Nigerian Youth
Movement (NYM ) in Nigeria, who they felt were prone to view the constitutional review
process as not being fully representative.775 The changed procedure adopted in 1949
would involve the formation of Provincial Committee members who would send
representatives to sit with members of the previously constituted House of Assembly on a
proposed regional body; a Central reviewing body would then be made up of members of
these regional bodies. The idea, according to the Governor of Nigeria, Sir John
Macpherson, is that if they were to bring into the reviewing bodies men from outside the
Legislature, the best way of doing so would be “to draw on representatives of Provincial
Committees.” These, it must be noted, were those who, according to the Governor, “at
the moment may have a very hazy idea of what the questions at issues are,” a telling
commentary on the people involved in these review exercises.
Although officialdom believed that by this process the population would have
been given “full opportunity to express their views on all the great issues involved,”776
consistent with the believed intent of the memorandum from A. B. Cohen to Governor
Macpherson of Nigeria, in reality, the new arrangements still contained many pitfalls. In
spite of the modified procedure to consult, ostensibly, from the grassroot level through
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formation of Provincial Committees, questions still remained of the democratic potentials
of this process. Salient questions as to who really got into these Provincial Committees
and how, what the agendas raised were, and how the issues were discussed are at issue.
If examined closely, the provisions would be seen to contain a lot of shortcomings that
constrained against whatever inherent democratic potentials the arrangement might have
had. In Northern Nigeria, for example, the arrangement involving channeling grassroot
consultation through Provincial Councils, etc., only served to silence the voices from
below and of new voices as the old traditional ruling elites manipulated the provision for
indirect election into regional and central bodies through a system of electoral colleges in
their favor. It facilitated the exclusion of members of grassroot-oriented bodies such as
the Northern Element Progressive Union (NEPU) from direct and full participation in the
political process and entrenched power in the hands of the traditional conservative elites
who were able to manipulate the procedures in their own self-interest.
This provision remained unchanged in the 1951 constitution and served to
continue to constrain against popular representation and against NEPU’s political
fortunes in the North and in the nation. In Northern Nigeria, as elsewhere where Indirect
Rule through Native Authorities was practiced and still retained, as also in Sierra Leone,
the Provincial Council which formed the electoral colleges was heavily composed of the
old traditional elites who were nominating into the Provincial Committees men of their
choice - the old traditional elite as well as a handful of perceived middle-of-the-road new
Western-educated Northerners such as Abubakar Tafawa Balewa.777 Furthermore, the
special technique built into the electoral regulations in early elections there in the 1951
constitution also gave undue advantage to the ruling elites in the Native Authority
system. The regulation permitted every Native Authority, typically an emir, to nominate
a number of persons equal to 10% of the final electoral college who were then 'injected'
into the college. These nominees included the choice of the emir and various pressures
operated to induce the members of the final electoral colleges to vote for them.
The 10% nominated candidates by the Native Authorities circumscribed whatever
beneficial effect the primary open voting stage introduced there may have served. In
reality, it only served to weigh the vote in favor of traditional and conservative elements.
In these contexts, any alternative political force seeking for democratic change of the
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Northern feudal system such as that which NEPU represented in the North, for example,
faced great odds. Such opportunities by the ruling elite for manipulating the limited
democratic openings that the new constitutions were affording only served the cause of
reactionary forces and to constrain against social change. In this particular place, in
Kano, for example, it created such anomalous situation in which ten of those who had
been defeated in the early balloting were among the twenty elected finally into the House
of Assembly in Kano in 1952 and all four candidates of the radical NEPU who had been
successful at the intermediate stage were defeated in the final College by previously
defeated nominees injected into the College by the Native Authorities under the 10%
formula.778 As a result, no member of the NEPU got elected into the 1952 House of
Assembly which served as an electoral college for the House of Representative, thus
further constraining NEPU's ability to participate in national politics on its own terms.
Radical Critique of Mainstream Trends from Within
The radicals continued to privilege contending and oppositional discourse of the nation
and of citizenship in more inclusionary terms to those being privileged by officialdom
and African cultural producers and political entrepreneurs. Their critique of mainstream
discourse and of on-going constitutional changes pointed to the limitations and
circumscribed democratic potentials of the new constitutions being proposed and enacted.
Right from the beginning of the process of constitutional reviews in the late 1940s, the
NEPU, for example, had raised opposition to the principle of nomination, in view of the
inherent potentials for abuse and for which they would be proved right. Emphasizing
NEPU’s concern for democratic change and popular representation, an official of NEPU
expressed to a member of the press during an interview in 1950 that “this age is that of
the common man and nobody can claim to speak for the North now without full
consultation with the masses of which we form a reasonable part.”779
There were also critics of the constitutional process within the mainstream from
left of center involving a very few radicals like Eyo Ita in the NCNC in Nigeria and I. T.
A. Wallace-Johnson of Sierra Leone who had now gained entry into the Sierra Leone
legislature. They raised serious objections to what he regarded as the undemocratic way
the new constitutional arrangements there were being patterned. He complained that the
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country could not really boast of a real democratic legislature because of the
undemocratic way the Protectorate was being allowed to elect its representatives through
electoral colleges780 consisting of Paramount Chiefs “who are stipendiary and dependent
on government approval.”781 He argued for direct voting throughout the Colony and
Protectorate.782 He traveled to Britain on account of his objections in order to discuss
with the Colonial Office what he felt to be the most glaring anomalies of the 1951 Sierra
Leone Constitution and of political developments there since the election in November
1951.783 Wallace-Johnson would continue his critique from within the Sierra Leone
Legislature subsequently as an Independent candidate. The critique of the Constitutional
Review Conferences in 1949/1950 in Nigeria by Eyo Ita, one of the NCNC
representatives to the review conferences, provides an in-depth and detailed account from
within the formal institutions of power of the shortcomings of mainstream trends and
constitutional changes and from a socially radical perspective and is examined in some
detail a liitle further down below.
The constitutional review process and provisions were also critiqued by other
social forces elsewhere in the colonies, including rightwing radicals. In Abeokuta, the
on-going organized movements against the Alake and the Native Authority System also
critiqued the way the constitutional review process was being handled there. The
Ogbonis who formed an important opposing group in the overall movement complained
that:
The procedure now being employed in making the
Constitution for Egbaland is too circumscribed and narrow
... the people should be consulted... If as it is now being
done a provisional draft preceded consultation it might give
rise to unnecessary and possibly unfair criticism, suspicion
and noise, and thus prejudice its chance of a wholehearted
acceptance.784
The Ogbonis had further complained that they “have discovered that in certain major
issues the wishes of the electorate were either disregarded or not even consulted at all.”785
One instance was in regard to the appointment of a new African Administrative Secretary
to replace the outgoing British official who had held this post till then. The Ogbonis
complained that the Egba Executive Committee, backed by colonial officials, took
arbitrary steps in choosing an unacceptable candidate as replacement. They complained
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that the secretary was appointed against the expressed wish of the majority of the
electorate. They petitioned that “the Egba Executive Committee was flouting the wishes
of the Egba people and placing an Egbado at the head of their affairs.”786 Although the
complaint of placing an “Egbado” instead of an “Egba” was partisan, there was a basis
for the allegation. The obvious and popular choice for the post was the Egba official who
had been the assistant and was reported to have acted successfully many times in the new
office now open.787 Perhaps because of his family's connection to Funlayo RansomeKuti who officials remained uncomfortable with, he was passed over for someone else
who had to be trained for the post by first being sent to England.788
Eyo Ita and the Discourse of Community and Citizenship: the Minority Report
Eyo Ita, in his Minority Report contended with the “Master Report,” i.e., the officially
endorsed report of the 1950 General Conference on the review of the Nigerian
constitution, as lacking popular base. 789 His critique of the new constitutional proposals
was painstakingly written out in his Minority Report790 as a member of the Constitutional
Review Committee and it affords some insight into the shortcoming of the new
constitutional proposals in this period and is examined at some length here.791 His
recommendations represented many of what other colonial social radicals were
advocating and fighting for but which they did not have the opportunity to present in an
official forum such as that afforded to Eyo Ita. The latter became as it were,
unselfconsciously, a voice within the mainstream for colonial radicals in the way he used
his presence in the Constitutional Review Committees and Conferences to seek for
fundamental and progressive changes.
Eyo Ita’s more progressive and differentiating views of the nation and notions of
citizenship from within the NCNC would also lead in the end to his later split from the
party after which he would form his own party, the United National Independence Party.
While still in the NCNC, he used the opportunity he had as a member of the
Constitutional Review Committee to put forward socially progressive views and
recommendations that he believed would establish the Nigerian nation-state on a more
representative and democratic basis. He advocated equality of status and universal
franchise for all citizens - male and female - popular representation, and abolition of
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parallelism in government which he believed privileged one group of citizen against
another. He was also against indirect election through Provincial or Divisional Electoral
Colleges, believing that representatives so elected could not feel directly responsible to
the people, etc. Eyo Ita indeed saw the constitutional review process of the late 40s as a
unique opportunity to change the direction of the country in more progressive ways. But
his voice was a lone voice that was marginalized in mainstream discourse of change at
the constitutional review conferences. He therefore presented his views as Minority
Report.
Eyo Ita opened his Minority Report by stating that “the new constitution for
Nigeria should seek to give the people of this country a genuine and thoroughly
consistent democracy.”792 In his opinion, the declared aim of the constitutional reform
was to maintain the unity of Nigeria but, he said, inequality of status and inequality of
opportunity will not secure it for them. In line with the views of social radicals like
Funlayo Ransome Kuti, Wallace-Johnson, and other radicals who critiqued the
undemocratic and unrepresentative nature of colonial governing institutions, Ita stated
that it would be undemocratic to call people to obey laws made by a body
unrepresentative of them or to pay tax to a government that was unrepresentative and
unresponsive to their basic needs as expressed in their legitimate desires, discussions,
resolutions and demands.793 “Colonial Legislature without colonial representation is
entirely undemocratic,” he wrote, citing for example, one of the consequences as
dragging the country into foreign wars and other “abnormal relations” with foreign
Peoples that were inimical to their welfare and “retardative to human progress.”794 He
went on to detail his views and recommendations of what a popularly-based and
responsive government should be, stipulations that he believed the Constitutional Review
Committees were in a vantage position to put forward. He pleaded for the provision in
the proposed new constitution that would guarantee to every citizen irrespective of tribe
or creed equal political status and equal opportunities to all citizens, including equal
economic, cultural, and social rights and privileges, as well as other basic human rights,
without any discrimination whatsoever. Ita advocated universal suffrage and gender
equity that would enable women as well as all non-Northern Nigerian males and females
to vote in the North of Nigeria, as the radicals like Hajiyya Sawaba and radical
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organizations in the North like NEPU were advocating in the North.795 He criticized the
recommendation of the Northern Regional Conferences that only all adult Northern males
of twenty five years of age or older should be qualified for election as unofficial
members. He critiqued it as “denying rights of citizenship and equality of franchise to
teeming populations of Southerners living in the Northern Sabongaris, paying taxes into
the Northern Treasury and obeying Northern Legislative laws.”796 He further criticized it
as tacitly denying these rights to Northern women and also to a vital Northern generation
aged between 21 and 24 years, believed by him to be more than sixty percent of the
Northern population.797
Advocating the sovereignty of the common people, he stood against the principle
of parallelism supported by the drafting committee whereby the House of Assembly and
the House of Chiefs would have “concurrent and equal powers.” He considered this as
undemocratic and “evil,” and that they did not have equal popular representation. “The
people in one are in a privileged class with superior status as compared to the other,” he
said, and saw the arrangement as feudalistic. He went on to comment that:
It is too well known that the power of Princes and the
power of the people are never ‘concurrent and equal,’ and
in the twentieth century democracy, it is the power of the
people which must prevail. Today, we are out to abolish
Feudalism, not to reform it.798
He also opposed the recommended development of parallelism of local
government and central government and described this as “water-tight departmentalism
of aspects of human existence which should be interactive and vitally related.”799 This
issue had long been raised as a problem in the Colonial Office itself by official Think
Tanks but were not resolved.800 Eyo Ita advised that both local government and central
government must be integrated in the national government and that both must interact to
release the total social energy. Considering local government as “one of the essential
organs of government, constituting an integral part of the whole National Government
and being vitally related to the more ‘superior organs,”’ he went on to point out what he
regarded as essential building blocks of a government predicated on popular
representation thus, and I quote at length:
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Local Government should, as a matter of fact, be an
important instrument with which we produce democrats as
the bricks with which we must build our democracy. It is
at this point that all adult citizens, men and women, should
take their shares in the Government, not only as voters of
representatives, but as actors in the day to day direction of
their lives as farmers, workers, traders, members of the
innumerable families, unions, clubs and societies. The
discussions of problems and expressions of the needs and
desires of the masses of the people, crystallized as the
peoples’ resolutions, should reach Government directly on
this level, and flow up the veins of government, through
intermediary organs to the central organ and influence and
determine the policy of Government …801
He further recommended the setting up of Village Councils where people should
be represented at the rate of 1:100 citizens and where help from the central government to
local farms, unions, industries, schools, hospitals, women and children welfare, would
come as responses to the discussions and resolutions of the people, reaching the
government through their Local Council and special committees. He viewed as
untenable and comparable to nomination the principle of indirect election through
Provincial or Divisional Electoral Colleges. Representatives so elected could not feel
directly responsible to the people, he wrote. “A new local bureaucracy thereby created
will become oblivious of the needs and desires and problems of the masses.”802 He
advocated direct representation on all levels of government for more responsiveness. In
advocating equality of status, he advised that no town or vested interest should be directly
represented in the Regional or Central Legislature. “Proportional and direct
representation is the only democratic solution,” he wrote.803
Eyo Ita also stood against the division of the country into three large and
perceived unimaginable regions on the basis that the methods of distribution of franchise
and grants and representation on the various levels of government violated the
fundamental principles of democracy.804 The situation, he said, demanded immediate
reforms. In regard to his views on national unity, he further wrote:
In the last analysis the unity of Nigeria is the unity of the
individuals in it. The individuals are bound together by
political ties of nationality. Identical nationality of any
country must surely carry with it identical political rights
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within the country, subject always to certain well defined
general disqualifications.805
Ita rejected resolutions which, he said, virtually “makes aliens of certain Nigerians in the
North,” stating that:
If the intention of the Conference is to have a united
Nigeria, then it must ensure different citizenship and
citizenship rights are not created within the country by the
various regions for persons born in Nigeria and regarded as
natives of Nigeria. Any other course would of necessity
give rise to the creation of different national status among
Nigerians.806
Eyo Ita’s recommendations were indeed wide ranging, also covering judicial and
financial matters. He advocated the separation of the judiciary from the legislature as
long overdue and supported the reform of the judiciary itself on the basis of fundamental
human rights. In regard to fiscal matters, he advocated revanching the whole fiscal
policy to provide equality of opportunities for all citizens in order to produce “the
greatest happiness of the greatest number.” He decried the use of taxes from
“disinherited unprivileged masses” to pay exorbitant sums on “lazy bureaucrats … rolling
in luxury.”807 He advocated the creation of a new system whereby the payment of costs
to keep offices and other overhead costs would be compatible with the economic status of
the poor citizens of the country. Sky-scraping salaries and interminable allowances from
revenues cannot be paid and expect to have enough money left to build schools and
hospitals for all citizens, including the provision of good clean water and enough light
and other amenities for all, he went on to say. He further wrote that:
Progress is impossible without radical reform on this most
basic issue. If we do not do it now in pleasant honorable
terms we shall be compelled to do it with pain and
bitterness when enough men and enough women who pay
taxes will read their situation rightly and will have an
intelligent say in the use and expenditure of their tax
monies and others of their own resources.808
Eyo Ita’s Minority Report and views could perhaps be regarded as the most
forward-looking critique launched from within mainstream organization and institution
and which underscored many of the shortcomings of the constitutional process and the
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terms in which self-government was eventually won. It could also be regarded as
anticipating many of the challenges of governance in post-independent Nigeria, as well as
of other many former African colonies. It underscores the failure of African politicians
as well as that of British officialdom to confront such challenges as those raised by Eyo
Ita in the pre-independence period. His advice went unheeded then and at independence,
and many of them still remained as challenges for current African governments. The
crises and ensuing struggles for the “second independence” in many of these erstwhile
African colonies have been predicated on the failed Independence Constitutions in
important ways as well as on subsequent failure of many African politicians to consider
democratically-based societies and responsible governments as serious programmatic
agendas.
Eyo Ita’s Minority Report predicated on the vision of a more inclusionary and
democratically-based notion of citizenship was not seriously considered by the
Constitutional Review Committees in the era of political decentralization. His motion
was turned down for a variety of reasons. His suggestion for a universal adult suffrage
was, for example, regarded as too difficult to organize, and he and Ojike who was a
minor party to the Minority Report were told to not “take the nation by storm.”809 A few
select items in his Report were, however, covered in later constitutional reviews, such as
the grant of universal male suffrage. However, Ita’s recommendations in general were
not esteemed by officialdom. The British and the African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs
were not committed to effecting social change which his recommendations embraced. As
the demand for change in colonial society became unrelenting across the board,
officialdom was committed to creating some measure of political change involving some
devolution of power to their African working partners while seeking to manage the
process. Both they and the British colonial authorities were not in the business of
creating grassroot change but in containing grassroot crises. Accommodation was the
watchword.
The following chapter seeks to examine aspects of the terms in which African
ethnopolitical entrepreneurs were constituting the “nation,” including an examination of
what they were doing with the categories of, i.e., “ethnicity,” “gender,” “religion,” class,”
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etc., in their “nation-forming” endeavors in the era of rapid constitutional changes of the
50s.
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Chapter 6
African Ethnopolitical Entrepreneurs and the Making of Categories into “Nation” - the
Master-Discourse
Introduction
This chapter seeks to examine the shifting political boundaries and how individuals were
positioning themselves vis-à-vis the community and the coordinates that determined
individual formulations of rights & belongings in the period of rapid constitutional
changes of the late 40s and 50s. It attempts to explore, in particular, aspects of the terms
in which African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs were reconstituting community and notions
of citizenship in this period. It examines how they were endeavoring to combine
materials that provided potential community or groupness,810 such as language, religion,
and culture, into “nation” and to what effect. 811 In this period, the “nation” was being
imagined among them in more exclusionary terms, demarcated discursively around
systems of negative distinctions in relation to not only differences of race vis-à-vis the
colonizer, but, internally, of “ethnicity,” “religion,” “gender,” “class,” etc. The chapter
seeks to explore aspects of how ethnopolitical entrepreneurs were attempting to reshape
lines of identification and the effects of their categorization on self-understanding, social
organizations and political claims of colonials. For example, the NPC political party in
Northern Nigeria, in their attempts to win constituencies among the Hausa-Fulanis in
their regional base in Northern Nigeria, discursively constituted minority Southerners
living in the North, especially the Western-educated and Christian Yorubas and Ibos from
Western and Eastern Regions, as the “outsiders” and “infidels.” The then Provincial
Commissioner in Zaria, Alhaji Ladan Baki, reported in an interview with Billy Dudley on
how they “had to teach the people to hate Southerners; to look on them as people
depriving them of their rights in order to win them over.”812 Many Hausa-Fulani
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commoners were receptive to this too, as seen in their participation in the May 1953
political disturbances in Kano.813
In this period, as opportunities for gaining power at the local and national levels
were began to open up and as the resources of the state were being redistributed to the
regional and local administrative units, competition for resources and to the means by
which they were controlled became intensified among Africans.814 Hitherto
developments towards National Societies and/or mutually- inclusive categories,
especially in the cities, began to be increasingly undermined in the discourses and
practices of ethnopolitical entrepreneurs especially. Local and regional tensions
intensified as ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, seeking to acquire political power,
discursively constituted the “nation” in “ethnic,” “gendered,” and other exclusive terms.
There was talk by Awolowo and the leadership of the AG party of the “Yoruba nation,”
of proving to the British colonial authorities that the “’Yorubas’ can govern themselves;”
talk by the Northern Nigerian Islamic ruling elites of driving out the “the infidels,” in
reference to the Christian Yoruba and Ibo nationalities in the North; talk by the Creoles
of Freetown in Sierra Leone of their supremacy and their rights of ascendancy over the
“illiterate” Protectorate Africans in the hinterland; talk of the “Ashanti nation” and cry of
Asante Kotoko, woyaa, woyaa yie among the Asantes in the Gold Coast as the Ashanti
National Liberation Movement was inaugurated on September 19, 1954 in the Gold
Coast, etc. “Nation-talk” was being privileged in divisive and virulent religious terms, as
seen in the 1953 Kano riots in Northern Nigeria explored a little further below in which
the Moslem Hausa-Fulani supporters of the NPC Northern political party war-sang: “the
pagans have killed a Hausa woman, we must kill the pagans before they kill us,” etc.,
referring to the Christian Southerners in the North. Men in their male-entrenched
political organizations were privileging the discourse of the “nation” and notions of
citizenship in patriarchal gendered terms. In the most dramatic case, the provision of
franchise to women was perceived as “revolutionary” and the men would rather seek to
put women in their place, i.e., as disenfranchised, disempowered party members in
parallel women’s wings in their political organizations, or in “purdah,” in the case of
Moslem women.
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This chapter seeks to examine the gap between the “nationalist” organizations and
the putative groups in whose names they claimed to speak. It examines what
ethnopolitical entrepreneurs and their political organizations were doing with categories
of, i. e., “ethnicity,” “religion,” “gender,” “class,” etc., in their political organizations in
this period and to what effect.815 It attempts to examine aspects of the process of
delegitimation and entitlement among citizenry and the language and mechanisms of
inclusion and exclusion involved in this process. It seeks to show how, in this period, the
language of ethnicity, race, religion, class, etc., which may signal the recovery of the
history needed to bind diverse elements, i.e., subgroups, into a single whole, was being
applied by African politicians – the political entrepreneurs and cultural producers – in
ways that concealed the actual inequities and exploitation and patterns of domination and
exclusion inevitably involved.
II
The making of categories of ethnic, race, religion, class, and gender, etc., into “nation” in
this period also involved the redefinition of the structural conditions under which the
conflicts of interest at the level of local African society were shaped.816 In this period,
age old conflicts in local African societies within and between communities and
individuals, including competition between settler and non-settler natives in local
communities, and conflicts arising from relations between old (chiefs) and aspirant new
power holders, i.e., Western-educated Africans, and with other sections of the
community, began to be reconstituted into conflicts carried on in nationality terms.
African politicians, seeking political power and already reinventing themselves as
‘partners worth working with’ to colonial officials, went to the people and got involved in
local conflicts, ostensibly to help resolve these but in the process sought to discursively
transform these conflicts into ones carried on in the name of the “nation.” “Nationalist”
politics began to interconnect in quite complex and contradictory ways with other
varieties of African politics and discourses. Socially-relevant conflicts of interests which
in local African societies remained rooted in the sphere of, i.e., economic life, religion,
kinship, relations between age and sex categories, etc., began to be increasingly
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transmuted into nationally-relevant conflicts of interest.817 Major sources of local
conflicts taking on new life at this time and being reconstituted in nationality terms
included conflicts between old and new aspirant status holders, i.e., “class”-related
conflicts, and conflicts between colonial chiefs and commoners in local administrative
units, i.e., community-/grassroots-related conflicts, etc. The anti-Agbaje Movement in
Ibadan, Western Provinces of Nigeria, in 1949-52, and the crises between the colonial
chiefs and commoners in Iperu and Ogere, and in Oyo, Western Provinces of Nigeria
explored a little further below, illustrate how ethnopolitical entrepreneurs were
attempting to reconstitute the conflicts in local African societies through their political
organizations818 in this period and to what effects. Languages of exclusion, couched in
religious, ethnic, class, and gendered terms, became more privileged even while the
rhetoric was unitary.
The “Native/Settler”-“Autochthon/Allochthon” Dichotomy
The politics of this period also involved a redefinition and politicization of the
native/settler distinction. This was in the efforts to limit access to resources for the
categorically constituted “outsiders.” In Nigeria, for example, as the resources of the
state were now being directed to the regions and distributed by the regional political
power and as the administrative units were becoming channels through which the state
afforded limited redistribution in on-going changes in local administration, non-native
status began to be politicized in host communities. In Ibadan, Western provinces of
Nigeria, for example, on-going tensions between natives and non-native settlers such as
over ownership of land, taxation, etc., which had previously been kept to a minimum
became heightened in this period. In the desire of native Ibadans to appropriate new
resources and power to themselves, they sought to retain stranger origin as a permanent
status attribute on non-natives and to oppose them as ineligible to purchase land. On the
other hand, inclusion in the community was competed for and claimed by the “nonnatives” as they contested such attempts to exclude them from resources and institutions
that conferred power and privileges in their host communities. In many localities, efforts
to redefine native/settler status and rights and entitlements were spearheaded by the
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ethnopolitical entrepreneurs and the coalitions that they built around them to this effect.
The anti-Agbaje movement examined below exemplifies these endeavors by
ethnopolitical entrepreneurs in Ibadan.
In the anti-Agbaje conflict, Chief Agbaje’s citizenship status in Ibadan was
questioned by his political rivals who attempted to redefine him as a non-native settler in
Ibadan in their efforts to thwart the chances of his becoming the next Olubadan in
Ibadan, the highest-ranking political post equivalent to that of the colonial chief. By
February 1951, a new United Front Committee was formed by Ibadan natives,
spearheaded by Agbaje’s political rivals, though composed of otherwise internal warring
factions, to counter “the new threat of the native settlers in Ibadan over the questions of
alienation of land to non-Ibadans and representation of non-Ibadans on N. A. Council.”819
One of its constituent groups, the Ibadan People’s Union (I.PU), on February 10, 1951
called on the Government to re-affirm the settlers’ status as “strangers ineligible to
purchase land although,” they went on, “the settlers had been allowed to mix
indiscriminately with native Ibadans.”820 Indeed, they had been allowed to “mix
indiscriminately” with native Ibadans before but now, with the new resources and power
being allocated to the regions and provinces, much was perceived to be at stake and the
“natives” – the omo ibile, i.e., sons of the soil - were eager to appropriate these for
themselves only, exclusive of the “settlers!” In Ijeshaland, also in the Western Provinces
of Nigeria, the Egbe Omo Ibile Ijesha (the “Society of Native Ijesha Sons”) which had
been founded as far back as July, 1940to express resentment at the employment of nonIjeshas around the town and had argued that Native Authority positions be held only by
Ijeshas had more or less lapsed. 821 But it was now reactivated in the era when access to
resources was being determined on regional/divisional basis.
The Anti-Agbaje Movement
The anti-Agbaje Movement is significant in a variety of ways but above all for
this study is its significance in the way that certain vested interests in the community
sought to reconstitute the native/settler dichotomy, as well as the contestations over rights
and entitlements by both native settlers and non-native settlers alike in Ibadan. It
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involved struggles by the latter not to be made into non-native settlers, i.e., as a
disenfranchised constituency, alienated from access to resources and the means to control
them, whereas the distinction between natives and non-native settlers had been blurred
hitherto. These contestations patterned the anti-Agbaje movement. 822 The movement
also became redefined by those constituted as “outsiders” – non-native settlers – in
Ibadan such as the Ijebus and the Egbas, and led by Awolowo, as a struggle for
citizenship rights, i.e., for democratic rights and for equal representation and voting rights
of all tax payers in Ibadan, further broadening the terms of the discourse in which the
struggle was constituted.
The anti-Agbaje conflict was essentially a “class” conflict, involving rivalry
among old and new aspirant power holders. However, it soon became reconstituted to
involve sub-nationality conflicts, communal conflicts pertaining to boundary issues,
settler versus non-settler conflicts (i.e., immigrant issues), generational conflicts, and
nationally-relevant conflicts, etc.823 The immediate cause of the Anti-Agbaje movement
in Ibadan in 1949 was, however, more narrowly and class-based, issuing from conflicts
between the old and the new nobility.824 It involved the desire of certain Ibadan chiefly
elites to arrest the meteoric rise of a new elite, Chief Salami Agbaje, the Otun Balogun,
one of important Ibadan chiefs, and to prevent him from potential access to a coveted
post - that of the Olubadan.825 Agbaje’s success as a capitalist had become threatening to
his opponents, particularly the old nobility who felt that he would use his Western
education and wealth to reach to the top position as Olubadan, felt to be the preserves of
the old nobility.826 Agbaje, as the Otun or second ranking chief in the Balogun’s line,
was eligible for the Olubadanship should it become available. His opponents therefore
attempted to depose him and deprive him of his current chieftaincy title as the Otun
Balogun in order to preclude his chances of rising through the ranks to become the next
Olubadan.
In the process, the struggle became discursively constituted into a nationality
issue, first as Ibadan natives versus non-natives as Agbaje’s opponents tried to depict him
as a native stranger, etc. The criteria of native became subject to new sets of
interpretation and tradition was construed to legitimize newly-constructed definitions of
native/non-native status and citizenship rights by Agbaje’s political opponents as they
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tried to depict Agbaje as a non-native and therefore ineligible to the post of chieftaincy
that he currently held. But the claim against him was contrived as Agbaje had legitimate
claims as a citizen and native of Ibadan.827 As Post and Jenkins summized in regard to
Agbaje’s opponents, “opportunism was their strongest common feature.”828 As the
struggle progressed, the personal became the communal as it became discursively
couched in a community, patriotic ethos, i.e., in the name of “the people” to whom the
struggle was carried. Hitherto conflicts between different constituencies among Ibadan
natives based on differences in education, wealth, age, etc., were subsumed as many
erstwhile and oppositional organizations among the Ibadan natives came together to form
a grand coalition, the United Front Committee.829 The coalition was formed “in the name
of the people” against Agbaje and to oppose non-natives in the attempt to exclude the
latter from the resources of the province. The anti-Agbaje alliance was united only by
opportunism. Post and Jenkins aptly remarked in regard to this movement that “the most
personal, ancient, and opportunistic elements entered into the dispute in the absence of
any clear rules as to the boundaries of the conflict!”830 They further summized that “in
the name of ‘the town’ and of a rather dubious and eroded tradition the forces gathered to
pull down a strong man.”831
The settler issue which was an important component of this struggle also became
the vehicle by which the movement was reconstituted into a nationally-relevant struggle.
This occurred as the largely Yoruba-composed Egbe, and later the AG in 1951, and the
NCNC waded into this conflict, as they and other ethnopolitical entrepreneurs and their
organizations in this and the other colonies would do in many other local conflicts in this
period, to move the movement along and to transform it into a struggle carried on in
pursuit of the attainment of regional and/or national unity and freedom. The Egbe/AG
led by Awolowo and other Yoruba Western-educated and commercial class, mostly
Ijebus and Egbas, and who supported Agbaje, would appeal for unity among Yorubas of
which the Ibadans formed a sub-nationality group, against perceived Ibo hegemony under
the Azikiwe-led NCNC. The NCNC allied itself in support of native Ibadans against the
Agbaje faction as means of gaining some leverage against its political rival, the AG. The
anti-Agbaje coalition did not, however, in the end succeed in displacing Agbaje. The
Butcher Commission of Inquiry that was set up by the colonial government to look into
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the anti-Agbaje agitational movement dismissed the allegations against him as unfounded
and British officialdom rejected the attempt to get rid of him.832 In the end, the Agbaje
crisis only set into motion a train of events that helped to hasten the government’s reform
process, reform initiatives that also inadvertently fed local conflicts and competition.
Going to the People
The Iperu/Ogere Crises
The involvement of African politicians in local struggles served to further intensify and
to redefine the conflicts and struggles in local African society. African politicians went
to the people and sought to reconstitute the conflict and competition within and between
groups and communities into ones carried on in the name of the “nation” and of
“national” freedom. In Iperu and Ogere, Ijebu-Remo sub-division of the Western
Provinces of Nigeria, the Yoruba Egbe organization got involved in the on-going
grassroot movements of the people of Iperu and Ogere against their rulers - the colonial
chiefs the Ologere of Ogere and the Alaperu of Iperu, and sought to resolve the crises in
terms of the wider unity of the Yoruba nation. Awolowo would subsequently say in
regard to what he perceived to be the successful resolution of the conflicts in these
localities that it would prove to the colonial authority that “we,” the Yorubas, “are able to
resolve our differences ourselves.” This was in part to legitimize Awolowo’s and the
Yoruba politicians’ support for the country’s governance and political advance on
regional basis. However, it is not clear that the popular issues, i.e., issues of democracy,
etc., involved in these crises were successfully or fully resolved.
The agitational movement in these localities had issued as a distinct conflict in the
relations between the colonial chiefs - the Alaperu of Iperu and the Ologere of Ogere and a cross-section of the community who were seeking for changes in the perceived
undemocratic local administrative system in these provinces. The conflict had been longstanding since 1945 but would soon incorporate other causes and interests. By 1950, the
movement had quickly developed into a united opposition of the mass of the people:
commoners who formed important part of the agitational movements here, disaffected
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sections of the old chiefly nobility, junior chiefs, and sections of the Western-educated
Africans. The junior chiefs, still unreconciled to their downgrading in the colonial
administrative hierarchy, included in Iperu the Olisa of Iperu, Olugbade Oremade, the
chief Asiwaju of Iperu, Awoniyi Jogbodo and the Lemamu of Iperu, J. O. Gisanrin. In
Ogere, they included the chief Oliwo of Ogere, chief Jomu. Among the ranks of some of
these lesser chiefs were also the new Western-educated Africans who were also
beginning to take on chieftaincy titles at this time to strengthen their social base of power.
These new aspirant power holders, together with the disaffected chiefs, formed
themselves at this time into quasi socio-political organizations called Majeobaje Societies
(i.e. society for the prevention of social destabilization) in both places. The Ogere
Majeobaje Society included those like S. T. Oredein, A. Shofunmade, and J. O.
Akinbowale, those who would subsequently emerge into greater prominence as
significant actors on the Nigerian political scene in quest of self-government for the
country.
The struggle of the people against their Obas in Iperu and Ogere in Ijebu Remo
sub-division was essentially tied to local issues and involved disputes over governance
and laws as well as over rights and entitlements. The participants were reacting against
the ills of the Native Authority system involving principally the perceived unbridled and
arbitrary use of power by the colonial chiefs as well as their own lack of representation in
the system. The colonial chiefs were accused of wrongfully controlling and misusing the
judicial system in their capacity as sole adjudicator in criminal cases, illegally taking
communal lands, misappropriating funds, and engaging in “anti-social” practices such as
seduction of married women.833 The conflicts had been long-standing, and the colonial
authorities had tried unsuccessfully to resolve it previously, as earlier mentioned. At
Ogere, what they did, in the usual officialdom’s fashion, was simply to order the
dissolution of the Town Council at the meeting where the petition against the Ologere
and the request for his deposition was first brought to official notice during the Chief
Commissioner’s tour of both areas in September 1949.834 The reason given for the
dissolution was also typical of officialdom’s normal response to popular pressures. The
Council was ordered to be dissolved by the Chief Commissioner “because of its
irresponsibility.”835 Officials had just then realized that the title “Town Council” was
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“unbefitting of Ogere anyway as Ogere is no more than a village.”836 By the beginning of
1950, the movement had resulted in the participants’ demand for the resignation of the
colonial chiefs and which the chiefs refused to do. When the Chief Commissioner was
later approached by the reconciling parties of Yoruba Obas and members of the Egbe,
after the initial meeting summoned in Ibadan by the Oni of Ife, with a request to grant
permission to them to send a Peace Mission to Ogere and Iperu, he was obliging. The
involvement of the Egbe under Awolowo was able to help arrest the further deterioration
of this crisis at this time837 at the same time as it also served to broaden the political
discourse in this and other localities in “nationalist” terms.
The Egbe/AG became involved in other conflicts and movements in Yorubaland,
seeking to introduce into the conflicts in these places a nationality discourse predicated
on the creation of the unity of the Yorubas as a precursor to the unity of the Nigerian
nation. They were not successful at capturing all social movements or organizations as
constituent parts of the AG,838 however. The AG sought, unsuccessfully, to bring the
AWU movement and the Nigerian Women’s Union (NWU) under its umbrella at the
same time as it was supportive of the return of the Alake against which the AWU under
FRK was opposed. FRK, who sought to sustain the democratic component of the AWU
movement and was insistent on the permanent removal of the Alake,839 refused to allow
the AG to bring the AWU under its tutelage and cooperated more with the NCNC which
it perceived to be more progressive. The AG succeeded, however, in getting support
from factions within the AWU and became an opponent subsequently of the AWU/NWU
under FRK leadership. The outright patriarchal/gendered nature of the AG, from which
the NCNC could also not be absolved, made the AG and AWU under FRK leadership to
be diametrically opposed to one another, among other considerations. The AWU/NWU
under FRK’s leadership sought to reconstitute gender norms in more equitable terms,
norms that the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs in the AG and in other mainstream political
organizations were perpetuating in reactionary ways in their discourse and practices.840
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Community and the Mechanisms of Inclusions and Exclusions
This section seeks to examine more closely aspects of what African politicians were
doing with the categories of ethnicity, religion, gender, etc., and how community and
citizenship were being constituted in their discourses and practices and in their political
organizations. It seeks to examine the mechanisms and language of inclusion and
exclusion involved in this process.
Languages of Inclusion and Exclusion
The privileging of the discourse of unity along vertical lines, i.e., “we are all Yorubas,”
“we are all Asantes,” “we are all Moslems,” etc., intended to bind groups into a
collective whole not only excluded certain others but also served to blur the horizontal
lines of division that cut across the would-be inclusive group. In Nigeria, the Western
regional political party, the AG, imagined the “nation” as predicated on the unity of the
Yoruba people and of other major nationality groupings. But the discourse of the
“nation” based on the unity of major nationality groupings and in the way it was being
constituted was not only potentially discursively excluding other nationalities vis-à-vis
the other, it was also serving to marginalize sub-nationality groupings within the major
nationality groupings. This involved the blurring of inherent lines of division and the
competing interests between and among individuals and groups within each major
nationality groupings based on western education, wealth, religion, gender, etc.
In the Western Region of Nigeria, Oladoke Akintola, the charismatic leader of the
Ogbomosho Parapo (OP) party and later the Deputy Leader of the AG and known for his
oratory, 841 was very skilful in his use of pun and play on words to mobilize the Yoruba
constituencies and to gain electoral votes based on what was believed united the Yorubas
in opposition to others. To woo the Yoruba voters from the AG’s rival party in the West,
the NCNC party which had been dubbed the ‘Ibo party’ as it was indeed highly
composed of Ibos by this time, Akintola would further appeal to the Yorubas through the
play on words suggestive of the fact that it was the Ibos in the NCNC party that were out
to dispossess the Yorubas. He would, for example, use the Ibo leaders’ names, such as
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“Ikejiani,” which bastardized translation into a Yoruba word meant “the other person has
accumulated wealth at your expense” and would ask, playing on the word Ikejiani, “Ekini
a ni, Ikejiani, ni’gba wo ni iwo na y’oni ti e?” (translation: ‘this one has and that one has,
when are you ever going to have your own?”). This was to imply that support for the
NCNC (the “Ibo party”) would only accrue more wealth into the hands of the Ibos at the
expense of the Yorubas and that it was only when the Yorubas acted in unison that the
resources of the nation would flow into their own region - Western Region - and into
individual hands. It worked for the AG. But the appeal lacked substance and also did not
address how the mass of the Yorubas to whom this appeal was directed would be able to
access the promised resources and accumulate these for themselves. For example, not
one cocoa farmer was directly put on the Cocoa Marketing Board when it was
decentralized to the regions. Yet the wealth of the Western Region was based in this
period mainly on the income generated from cocoa production. Except for its resounding
success and attention to the issue of education which the AG’s Universal Primary
Education (UPE) program signified,842 his AG political party that dominated the Western
Region of Nigeria did not seriously address many of these issues. The AG and the
politicians that headed it, as with other ethnopolitical entrepreneurs and their political
parties, were more out to win electoral votes and to consolidate their power position and
control of the West.
Also, the major nationality groupings on which the discourse of regionalism was
predicated were not monolithic. The Yorubas, for example, were certainly not a
monolithic group. Though a highly homogenous people in terms of culture and formed a
well-defined society with a common history, shared experience, distinct and common
language, single and contiguous geographic area and even the belief in a common
eponymous ancestor, Oduduwa,843 they had differences in regional traits and
characteristics and recognized their membership in sub-groups such as Ijebu, Ibadan,
Ijesha, Ekiti, Ondo, Akoko, Oyo, etc. Hence the conflicts of interests between and
among them which dated into the nineteenth century and continued, in renewed contexts,
especially in the era of new constitutional provisions and re-allocation of revenues to the
regions and which afforded access to power and resources by those that controlled the
regional government. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, the Yorubas were
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known to have been busily engaged in fratricidal internecine warfare, after the collapse of
the old Oyo Empire which had been a powerful political center, and as new centers of
power were being established and new political alignments were being made.844 The
differences and causes of disenchantment among the Yoruba nation were no less so in the
era of colonial rule,845 or now, in the era of political decentralization. In fact, the very
promise of a new era in which power and control of funds and resources were being
devolved to Africans by the foreign power actualized the differences and made the
competition among them more volatile. It was such that certain sub-groups of the
Yorubas, some constituencies among Ibadan natives, organized into the Egbe K’Oyinbo
Mai’lo846 (the “society for the white man not to depart yet”). They would rather have the
foreign power – the British - remain in power and in control than have the perceived
Ijebu-Egba-composed Yoruba Western regional political party – the AG - hold sway over
them. It was also due to the rivalry and competition among the Yoruba sub-groups that
many Ibadan and Ijesha constituencies went into alliance with the Ibo-composed NCNC
as means of gaining leverage over their Yoruba compatriots who formed the leadership
and membership of the AG.
It was these and other differences among the Yoruba nationality groupings,
including gender inequities, that the AG’s discourse of the unity of the Yorubas, for
example, stood to discursively obliterate. The unity of the Yoruba ‘nation’ was being
constituted by Awolowo and the leadership of the AG at the expense of the meaningful
inclusion of important constituencies such as women, farmers, etc., who also comprised
the ‘nation’ being constructed by them. The AG did not seriously engage, for example,
with how the resources that were now being directed to the regions would be equitably
distributed among the various groups that composed the Yoruba nation in its region of
control – the Western Region – or how they would be equitably represented. Hence some
Yoruba sub-groups perceived the AG party as the party that privileged the interest of
certain other Yoruba sub-groups and class, i.e., the Egbas and the Ijebus and who were
also the professional, Western-educated, Christian, and commercial class that comprised
the AG party leadership, over that of other sub-groups such as the Ibadans, and other felt
marginalized groups.
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Religion
African politicians – the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs - were also politicizing religion in
their “nation-forming” endeavors and in their desire to acquire power and/or consolidate
their power base. In the North of Nigeria, the ruling elites that also composed the
leadership of the NPC party privileged the discourse of “One religion” and appealed to a
shared Islamic faith that potentially united rulers and most of the ruled in the North of
Nigeria to construct a “homogenous” nation in the North. However, the NPC’s discourse
of “One Religion” in a territory composed also of significant Christian population, as
well as animists, though in the minority, was more reflective of its attempts to sustain the
hegemony of the Northern political elite by seeking to sublimate internal religious
differences in the North while using the category of religion as a political weapon.
Radical rightwing groups and stalwarts within the NPC such as the Association of
Madmen formed in 1953, operated for sometime as rightwing extremist groups seeking to
realize the NPC’s goals by mobilizing on religious grounds against “unbelievers,”847 i.e.,
all non-Moslems in the North. The NPC also used its control of the Native Courts - the
alkali courts - in the North, to put non-Moslems, as well as women, at a disadvantage in
its procedures and judgments. The Report of the Commission of Enquiry that was set up
later to look into the fears of minorities in Nigeria found, for example, that “in theory …
the evidence of a male Muslim is of greater value than that of a woman, a Christian, or a
pagan.”848
The use of religion to bind diverse elements, i.e., subgroups, into a single whole
also conceals the inherent inequities and exploitation and patterns of domination and
exclusion. The NPC party’s endeavors and representation of Northern society in
homogenous terms concealed the otherwise lines of division between the wealthy and
ruling elites that composed the leadership of this party on the one hand, and the mass of
the impoverished populace, on the other, though the lines of division were mediated in
certain ways by, i.e., patron-client relationships and other and complex forms of
relationship people were involved in. The NPC would exploit the very structure of
inequity in the Northern Native Authority system, based in part on unequal access to
resources and to the means by which these were controlled, to amass votes in the North
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and to legitimize its discourse of the “nation” in the terms in which it sought to privilege
it. Allegiance to the NPC party was derived in ways that included the fear of losing
privileges controlled by the Native Authorities such as the right to jobs in the Native
Administration, the ability to enroll children in the Native Authorities schools, or the
ability to enjoy the patronage of the Native Authorities in the award of contract to both
small and big businesses. Those who in spite of these went ahead to join more popularlybased political movements or parties such as the NEPU that challenged the NPC and the
structure of inequities that it was perceived to be based on suffered recriminations from
the state. These included loss of jobs and property, including summary arrests, beatings
and imprisonment. The memoirs of Mallam Ringim, a Moslem intellectual and an
avowed NEPU leader and activist, are filled with such incidents of beatings, deprivation,
and constant imprisonment at the hands of the Native Authorities.849
The NPC’s discourse of “One North, one People, irrespective of religion, rank
and tribe,” was in reality, a myth and represented a further attempt by the NPC to
sublimate internal differences and divisions, as well as to undermine the rights and
entitlements of other sub-nationality groups within its region, even while the rhetoric
acknowledged these differences. The NPC was built on, and was meant to sustain these
very differences and structure of inequity. The minority Tivs and other sub-groups that
comprised part of the Northern region at the time did not feel well served in terms of
access to the resources or the institutions of power in the North. Even among the HausaFulanis that made up the bulk of the Northern population, the erstwhile lines of division
between Hausa indigenes and the Fulanis who came as conquering and aristocratic
invaders in the pre-colonial period850 remained in important ways, blurred only by such
ties as patron-client ties, etc. It was these differences and structures of inequity that
privileged the aristocratic Hausa-Fulani ruling elites against the mass of the Hausa
peasantries and other sub-groups that the NEPU stood to challenge, though fairly
unsuccessfully, in its counter discourse of community and citizenship in mutuallyinclusive terms.851
In the North of Nigeria, as in other similar cases in the other colonies, the ruling
elites were able to manipulate resources at their disposal to their advantage and to turn
the “class” divide on its head fairly well by exploiting the “ethnic” or “nationality” and/or
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religious divide between Hausa-Fulanis and non Hausa-Fulanis. They were able to fairly
successfully invoke their shared Islamic faith with the talakawas, i.e., the mass of the
peasantries, to enforce some degree of obedience and conformity and to evoke, stir,
summon, and mobilize them against their political opponents and competitors in the
North and from outside their regional base of power in their efforts to consolidate their
hold on power. Within their region, the Western-educated Southerners, and other
Southerners, many of whom were also Christians, and who formed the mainstay of the
Northern regional administration and important sectors of the Northern economy outside
the group of expatriates, were identified as the “class oppressors” by the NPC in its
efforts to win mass support.
The May 1953 Kano crisis demonstrates what more recent studies have shown of
how rulers’ practices of naming, classifying, and summoning and evoking “groups”
affected/shaped the self-understandings, social organizations, lines of identification, and
political claims of subjects. Commenting, for example, on the performative character of
categories of ethnopolitical practice and the ways in which, and purpose to which
ethnopolitical entrepreneurs evoke “groups,” Brubaker writes that “by invoking groups,
they seek to evoke them, summon them, call them into being … to justify, mobilize,
kindle, and energize.”852 He adds that “by reifying groups, by treating them as
substantial things-in-the-world, ethnopolitical entrepreneurs can … ‘contribute to
producing what they apparently describe or designate.”’ 853 In the May 1953 crisis in
Kano, Northern Nigeria, significant segments of the Hausa peasantries and talakawas
whose interests NEPU was organized to fight for, bought into the appeal of the NPC for
support based on their shared Islamic faith and many of them rose in support of the rulers
and Northern elites, who composed the NPC party leadership, against the “infidels”
(Christians) from the South with whom NEPU was affiliated. The May 1953 Kano
disturbances occurred as a result of the attempts of the Southern parties - AG and NCNC
- in conjunction with NEPU, to hold political rallies in search of electoral votes in this
part of the nation. The Kano Native Authorities, composed of many of the leaders of the
NPC political party of the North, were bitterly opposed to the “invasion” of the North by
the Southern political parties and mobilized against them. In the political disturbances
that followed in Kano, many talakawas demonstrated against NEPU and the Southern
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parties - the AG and the NCNC - on behalf of the NPC, shouting ethnically- and
religiously-charged slogans such as, “We do not want the Yorubas here,” “the Ibos had
killed all the Northerners in the Sabon Gari,” and “the pagans have killed a Hausa
woman, we must kill the pagans before they kill us.”854 The 1953 crisis in Kano could
also be said to demonstrate in some ways the symbolic power of the state, according to
Foucault’s notion of governmentality, to state what is what and who is who and thereby
impose legitimate principles of vision and division of the social world.855
Gender
The creation of boundaries of exclusion in the discourses and practices of African
ethnopolitical entrepreneurs also involved the making of the category of gender into
“nation” in mutually-exclusive forms. It involved the closure of political opportunities
allowed discursively for women’s presence and agency in their political organizations as
well. Gender boundaries were created in mainstream political parties such as the AG,
NCNC, CPP, SLPP, etc. Membership and formal participation of women in these parties
were predicated on various kinds of containment and subordination.856 Parallel women’s
organizations – women’s wings - were created in these mainstream parties but the
purpose was mainly to strengthen the base of power of the male-dominated parties
without giving political agency to these women. Women were not in the executive or in
decision-making bodies such as could influence party policy or agendas. Instead, they
were seen as another source of acquiring electoral votes. One was through the use of
whatever influence they could exert on the electorate, i.e., through the women’s wings of
the parties. The Sardauna of Sokoto, Alhaji Ahmadu Bello, leader of the NPC party that
controlled the Nigerian Central Government at independence in 1960, saw women’s
enfranchisement, if at all conceded, as serving to empower men and the party, for
example.857 “It would, of course, greatly strengthen our position as a party,’ he
commented later in his reflection on the issue of voting rights for women, ‘for all the
women would vote in the same direction as their men folk and thus our support would be
more than doubled by a stroke of the pen.”858
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African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs were more successful at putting women on
the agenda of their political organizations as symbolic of inclusiveness or of the need for
change, than for incorporating gender analysis and gender equity into the discourse of the
nation or of change. Mainstream political parties, led and managed by men, constrained
against women’s presence in terms of visibility, efficacy, and recognition, and in some,
as in the NPC in Northern Nigeria, women virtually had no presence. There, the
invisibility of women was near total - in physical, social, and political terms. The case of
the NPC party dramatizes the highly gendered dimension and ways in which what had
become mainstream political organizations in the 50s silence and marginalize women
within and without these organizations.
The NPC, more or less the party of the Moslem mallams, did not even make any
pretensions of its patriarchal and gendered bent which the leadership believed to be
legitimized by Islamic religious norms. In his autobiography, Alhaji Ahmadu Bello,
president of the NPC until his assassination in the 1966 Nigerian military coup, reflecting
on the position, or rather the marginalization of women in the NPC, remained
condescending towards women till the end. In his reflection on the issue of voting rights
for women, he stated that he believed that it would be socially destabilizing, with
potentials for revolutionary upheavals, to give women the vote!859 He was convinced that
“the unrest and trouble that would ensue would … be serious and widespread,”860 and
that most of the men would be incapable of understanding the need for “such
revolutionary change.”861 He recalled further in his autobiography that his party – the
NPC - was often taken to task about votes for women, and said, “I dare say that we shall
introduce it – but – and this is important – it is contrary to the wishes and feelings of the
greater part of the men of this region that I would be very loathe to introduce it
myself.”862 In this very patriarchal society, the male position and interest was the
yardstick of what happens in regard to the status of women. Thus, when the Sardauna
conceded that women could be considered to have the vote, it was in terms of male role
and empowerment, as stated above.
The gendered dimension and the marginalization of women in colonial society as
well as in mainstream parties was contested by the social radicals who attempted to
reconstitute notions of gender in more equitable terms in their own discourses and
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political organizations as is revealed in the following chapter. Eyo Ita’s Constitutional
Review Minority Report863 which emphasized the need to put women’s interest and
agenda at the center of national discourse, and the discourses of alternative movements
and organizations led by women radicals and other social radicals, provide apt
commentary on the marginalized position of women in these mainstream parties and in
colonial society. The position of women in other more progressive political
organizations, mainly those of social radicals like the WAYL, NEPU, or the NWU,
compare more favorably to their position in mainstream political parties in which women
remained subordinated. Wallace-Johnson’s WAYL, for example, was the first political
organization to put women in the executive of the party.864
The marginalized position of women in mainstream political parties is not only
reflective of the ways in which categories of “gender,” “religion,” “ethnicity,” etc., were
being made into “nation” in these parties in mutually-exclusive and narrow terms but also
of the political culture that defined the drive towards political independence in these
societies.
The Marginalization of Popular Issues, Part 1
The political opportunities allowed discursively for other constituencies and other
popular agendas were similarly constrained in mainstream political parties and in the
“nation-forming” endeavors of ethnopolitical entrepreneurs. From the 1950s onwards,
and as these political parties - AG, NCNC, NPC (Nigeria); CPP, UGCC, NLM (Gold
Coast); SLPP, NC (Sierra Leone) - were becoming more dominant in the colonies
through the opportunities afforded them with the new constitutions, the discourse of the
“nation” and of citizenship was being privileged in various ways and to varying degrees
at the center of party and national agenda to the near exclusion of serious discussion of
popular issues. The vision of a self-governing nation and of its promised rewards was
being substituted at this time for the discourse and resolution of popular issues affecting
the mass of the people. There was no discussion or serious discussion of how the various
segments of society, especially the grassroot, would be included in the power structure or
in the institutions by which they were governed, or of how they would gain equitable
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access to the resources of the “nation,” causes that had galvanized these marginalized
constituencies into action at various times. Many of these had also joined what were
now becoming mainstream political organizations and parties in the hope of realizing
these goals.
These political parties, seeking legitimacy and electoral votes, could not afford to
ignore popular concerns initially or altogether, however. In fact, the ability to thrive
politically especially at the onset was based precisely on the degree to which efforts were
made to address popular issues and concerns. Initially, therefore, these political parties
showed some openness to popular issues, such as the provision of amenities related to
health, education, etc., in their discourses and to match their rhetoric of “of life more
abundant” if voted for. The AG and the NCNC, for example, the two rival Southern
Nigeria’s political parties, competed for electoral constituencies on a program based on
welfare socialism, meant to promise equal opportunities for all citizens. The Universal
Primary Education Program (UPE) was the most succinct of such programs that were
embarked upon. Political leaders of the early 1950s – the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs were in fact gaining popular support by promising such benefits to all citizens that neither
the British nor the chiefs were likely to provide. But the openness to popular issues
became closed over time and remained more or less at the level of rhetoric in most
instances. Even where serious and sustained efforts were made to meet popular
expectations as the AG and the NCNC attempted to do in their introduction of free
universal primary education, popularly known as UPE, this had to be scaled down in the
course of its implementation. The UPE program is examined in some brief detail below
as one of the select instances where some ethnopolitical entrepreneurs seriously
addressed popular issues in socially radical terms in their political organization.
The Universal Primary Education (UPE) Program
The AG’s and NCNC’s welfare politics in Nigeria and which the UPE program
typified was about the most effective in linking political leaders with the masses in these
places. The program was bigger than life in conception and overreaching in terms of
actual financial and human resources available, but it matched popular expectation and its
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very grandiosity, irrespective of the ability to deliver, recommended it highly to all
constituencies. The AG’s motto, “Freedom for All and Life More Abundant,” promised
increase in the standard of living of Nigerians, reinforced by its name, the Action Group,
translated as Egbe Afenifere which meant “the society of the lovers of good things.” Its
symbol, the palm tree, symbolized prosperity. Both parties upped the ante, promising
more than they could deliver, though the West had more financial resources to meet its
obligations better than the East. But both had to revise the U.P.E. program plan in the
course of implementing it.
The UPE program in the West was the most laudatory and it still lived on in
popular consciousness in Nigeria till today, especially in the Western states of Nigeria
where it was operative, as “Awolowo schools.”865 It was indeed a program conceived to
meet, and in a lot of ways met popular expectation across the board, providing equality of
opportunity to education for all irrespective of social background, religion, gender, and
place of origin in the state, including previously underserved areas. It was conceived and
proposed as an “all-out expansion of all types of educational institutions,” a cornerstone
of the principles that guided the AG party, according to one of the authors of the program
who was also regarded as the primary brain behind its formulation, Chief S. O. Awokoya,
the Minister of Education for the Western Region.866 Chief Obafemi Awolowo, who
became the Western Region’s Minister for Local Government and unofficial Leader of
Government Business in the Western Region,867 only two days after the Western House
of Assembly had assembled for its budget session, stated:
As far as possible expenditure on services which tend to
the welfare and health and education of the people should
be increased at the expense of any expenditure that does not
answer to the same test.868
This commitment to free and easy access to education to all indeed showed the
otherwise more narrowly-based mainstream political parties in their best light in Southern
Nigeria as responsive to popular opinion.869 There is no doubt that education was one
major issue on which the AG - and the NCNC - tried to meet popular pressure and
expectation, and though both had to modify their initial grand scheme, they still
succeeded in gaining public satisfaction over this.870
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Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the leader of the AG party, personified the belief and
the values placed on education by the AG party. He was convinced that education was
the fundamental basis and cornerstone of any development program and the most potent
weapon left to mankind to transform itself and its environment.871 He believed that a
minimum level of education was required to have an enlightened citizenry for rapid
development, that education was the prerequisite for leadership at all levels, and that it
was an inalienable and fundamental right of every citizen.872 Because he recognized that
not everyone would be able to afford to educate themselves even at the primary level
because of their background, family, and class, etc., he came to the conclusion in 1954
that the purpose and goal of education could not be attained unless it was free for all at all
levels.873 He stated:
In order to attain to the goals of economic freedom and
prosperity Nigeria must do certain things as a matter of
urgency and priority. It must provide free education
(at all levels) for the masses of its citizens.874
Although the AG gained major political capital from this program, there is no
doubt that Awolowo, especially, was not out to play politics with the issue of education
and free primary education for he was genuinely convinced of their merits. He is widely
believed and known in Nigeria to be the first Nigerian to advocate a free education policy
and to implement it as leader of Government in the West. This belief remained with him
and he campaigned for it consistently and vigorously even after Nigeria’s independence
to the extent that he also became in 1966, the first to suggest that it be included in
Nigeria’s Constitution.875 It also formed one of the cardinal points of the Unity Party of
Nigeria (UPN) which he formed in the 70s to contest the election for Nigeria’s Second
Republic.876
The Marginalization of Popular Issues, Part 2
Free primary education was, indeed, an issue that these parties could not afford to
neglect, as it was also dear to the heart of the populace and the underprivileged who saw
western education as the way out of the ranks of the dispossessed and into the good life.
These mainstream political parties and their leadership did not, however, exhibit the same
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serious commitment to a variety of other popular issues such as, for example, the
broadening of the base of representation to include other social forces as women, farmers,
etc. Grassroot constituencies remained marginalized in these political parties and neither
did they have direct representation in the colonies’ governing institutions. Even when the
Marketing Boards were decentralized and afforded regional control in early 1954, no
farmer or their representative was brought into these Marketing Boards, for example.
The gendered and exclusionary terms in which nationhood was being constructed by
these African politicians are reflected in their political discourses and party agendas and
structure. Although the franchise regulations limited Africans that could vote or be voted
for, those who met the franchise regulations and could have served to effect the discourse
of the nation in more popular terms, like the few social radicals who had been important
members of these political parties, such as the labor radicals in the NCNC and in the
CPP, were expelled or silenced. The labor radicals’ attempts to continue to strive to
privilege popularly-based discourse of rights and entitlements at the center of national
agenda within these mainstream political organizations were deemed to be inconsistent
with the goals and aspirations of the African politicians that controlled these parties.
The hierarchical structures of mainstream political parties predisposed to the
undermining of the discourse of popular issues and constrained against the realization of
any democratic potentials in them. The leadership components issued from a narrow
select group: Western-educated, wealthy commercial group, chiefly elites, etc., i.e., the
AG, UGCC, NPC, SLPP, and whose influence bore heavily on party policies and
decisions. Even in political parties that originated as more mass-oriented parties such as
the NCNC in Nigeria and the CPP in the Gold Coast, the space for popular discourse
became narrowed over time as the political entrepreneurs that controlled these parties
began to gain and to consolidate political power in the 50s. These mainstream political
parties in the various colonies became characterized by a lack of open discussion and the
silencing, in various ways, of voices from below or of alternative imaginings of the
nation in more inclusive terms.877
In the NCNC, dissensions with the views or position of the president, Azikiwe,
were not usually received by him in good faith and had led to suspensions and/or
dismissals of such critics, if not voluntary resignations by the latter.878 Azikiwe was
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dexterous in having the NCNC party arrive at a decision that he was in favor of, even if
this circumscribed the democratic process. This is seen, for example, in the way the
NCNC’s position was changed from its advocacy of a unitary constitution to its
acceptance of a federalist one,879 as well as the way in which he tried to maneuver to his
advantage the African Continental Bank scandal in which he was implicated. Many party
leaders that were critical of his financial dealings and wanted to get to the root of the
matter were expelled or forced to leave the party.880 Those that left the party as a result
of the ACB controversy and their felt frustration with Azikiwe included Eyo Ita.
Internal dissensions and resignations within the mainstream parties also provide
some glimpses into the narrow structural base of these parties. Both Awolowo and
Azikiwe in Nigeria and Nkrumah in the Gold Coast, for example, were severely criticized
as their party’s president for dictatorial tendencies by some of those that had also held
leadership positions in their parties and which led to some of these critics’ decision to
resign from the party - that is, if they were not expelled as expulsion was a popular
weapon of Azikiwe, especially. More democratically-inclined leaders of the AG such as
the Minister of Education, Mr. Awokoya, the Minister of Works, Mr. Babalola, and the
AG Publicity Secretary, Mr. Amos, all criticized the perceived authoritarianism of the
AG party and of the leader, Mr. Obafemi Awolowo, and resigned from the party. 881 Mr.
Babalola described Awolowo as an “autocrat.” Awokoya, who was also the primary
author of the AG party’s educational schemes, resigned in 1955, opposed to what he
perceived as “a totalitarian government dominated by the personality of Chief
Awolowo.” 882 He subsequently established a new political party named the Nigerian
People’s Party, indicative of Awokoya’s desire for a democratically-based party. His
political party did not, however, have the clout or the following that the AG had already
acquired and it soon became disbanded. The views of those disenchanted with the parties
and who resigned from them may not be altogether disinterested and the squabbles in the
party might also be indicative of a struggle for power among the party elites and
leadership. 883 Nevertheless, their critiques of the party offer important validation of
some of the shortcomings of these political parties and of their leadership components, as
revealed in other contexts.
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Also, the manner in which these political parties supported local issues served to
marginalize popular issues as well. The political parties that became mainstream in these
West African colonies were lacking in ideology and were more geared towards what
would win votes. They were, as many African political parties at independence had been
popularly referred to in studies of this period, mostly electoral machines. These parties’
involvement in local conflicts/struggles and the positions staked out by the parties were
usually contingent on the perceived advantage of what would advance the interest of the
party and those of its leadership against rival parties and not necessarily on the merits of
the conflicts or of their resolution in popular terms.
The AG’s goal of creating a united Yoruba nation from a power base made up of
new and old nobility, for example, often meant that its involvement in on-going local
conflicts was determined by this singular goal which sometimes ran in opposition to
popular interests.884 Thus, in two popular local movements against the colonial chiefs,
the AG supported the chief in one and opposed the chief in the other, because one chief
was compliant and harmonized with the AG’s goal and the other was not. The AG had
argued for the reinstatement of the deposed Alake of Egbaland on the basis of the unity of
the Egbas and of the Yorubas even though the Alake was forced to abdicate as a result of
popular grassroot movement against him. In this case, the Alake was using the AG to
help him gain back his position as much as the AG hoped to gain by subsequently
appropriating his base of power in their support of him. The same was true of their
support of the Ologere of Ogere and Alaperu of Iperu in the conflicts between these
chiefs and the populace in Ogere and Iperu although the Egbe/AG did not appear as
partisan. They helped to retain the chiefs in power while also gaining their support in the
course of helping them. In the case of the crises in Oyo, the AG which positioned itself
on the sustenance of the Yoruba chiefs as crucial authority figures in Yoruba society, did
not hesitate to undermine the authority of the Alafin of Oyo and to align against him
when he proved to be a clog in the wheel of the AG’s advancement in that part of the
Western region. The Alafin of Oyo, Oba Adeyemi, was seen as an impediment to change
and to the AG’s goal of extending its base of power in Oyo, the Alafin’s province. The
Alafin, fearful of the potential erosion of his power base, was resistant to the changes
being made in the Native Authorities by Councilors elected under the 1952 Western
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Regional Local Government Ordinance and who were mainly AG supporters; he also
supported the movement against the Capitation Tax introduced by the AG-controlled
Divisional Native Authority Council.885 The AG in turn supported the anti-Alafin faction
and used its leverage and the political influence of the Councilors to thereby erode the
base of power of the Alafin.886 The focus of the AG in all of these interventions was on
the consolidation of its power base in these localities and provinces.
The overriding factor in the NCNC alliances, as in the case of other parties
elsewhere, was the drive to win votes and in competition with rival political parties. In
the case of its alliance with the Alafin of Oyo in his conflicts with the AG, the advantage
went to the NCNC. The NCNC, AG’s main political opponent, took political advantage
of the disturbances in Oyo and gained the support of the Alafin, including that of the
main organization of the Alafin’s supporters in Oyo, the Oyo Parapo, to gain a
significant foothold in that part of the Western Provinces. The question of the future of
the Alafin was an important issue in the Western Regional election of May 1955, and the
return of the Alafin who the AG had forced into exile was one of the main points in the
NCNC program. In the aftermath of the April 21st disturbances and of the election that
followed in May 1955, the NCNC succeeded in having three of the five elected members
from Oyo province as NCNC.887
The constituent grassroot party members or supporters were also part cause of the
displacement of issues of concern to them. Some would, however, try to maneuver the
process and the inherent ambiguities to their perceived advantage, making some winners
and others losers. Party affiliation by the people was also strategic, based on perceived
gains, or what they had come to believe the political party could achieve for them – as
opposed to what these parties could actually deliver to them!
In what became the master-discourse of the nation, the rhetoric of life more
abundant and promise of good things to come replaced the substance of that life more
abundant. The lack of ideological commitment to issues of social change and the
imagining of the nation and citizenship in the terms in which African ethnopolitical
entrepreneurs that led these mainstream parties contrasted with the colonial radicals’
ideological commitment to those issues, including issues of inclusiveness, and their
attempt to privilege such issues in their discourses and political organizations. So much
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weight was now being put by the former on the grant of self-government to usher in the
good life in the mid-50s that there was no serious discussion of the social and political
arrangements that would ensure these and the rights of the citizens in the new
independent states, or of the challenges to be overcome. Rather, they placed the burden
on the grant of self-government itself to usher in the life more abundant to all and as the
panacea to all ills: social, political, economic, etc. This position is captured in
Nkrumah’s famous political dictum, “seek ye first the political kingdom and all other
things would be added.” It more or less represented the philosophical underpinnings of
these mainstream parties in terms of their position on many of the compelling social
issues of the time and of many other issues that could be anticipated in post-colonial
African societies. The ethnopolitical entrepreneurs did not, for example, confront the
problem of African states’ social pluralism but blurred over it in their construction of a
“homogenous” community which failed to address the underlying divisions and
inequities. The colonial social radicals attempted to confront this as well as many other
pertinent social issues. Post-independent African societies proved that all other things
did not get added on automatically. What it led to are the continued crises of democracy
and citizenship in many post-independent African states, the spate of military coups
especially in the first few decades of self-government, civil wars, genocide, etc. 888
Mainstream party leadership’s goal of the acquisition of state/national power
became synonymous with the nation-state. There was no principled commitment among
them to what would effect democratic change or how the nation-state would be sustained
or be made viable. And this is the critical factor and major shortcomings of the drive for
self government among mainstream African politicians at this time – the lack of
commitment to social change and democratic principles. What there was among many of
these political parties and the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs that composed its leadership,
was, rather, a rush to self-governing statehood, to be paralleled by British officialdom’s
own rush to decolonize from the mid-50s onwards.889
Eyo Ita’s critique of the constitutional proposals being put forward during the
General Conferences for the review of Nigeria’s constitution from 1949 was poignant in
regard to the limitations of the terms in which the idea of self-government was being
discussed, sought for, and was eventually given. His alternative proposals for
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constitutional change was premised on the notion of citizenship in more inclusionary
terms, and was predicated on the resolution of, and centering of popular issues, such as
the grant of universal suffrage, the provision of equality of opportunity to all Nigerians,
etc.890 Mr. Eyo Ita, who was also at the Provincial and Regional Conferences for the
review of Nigerian constitution, opened his minority reports by stating that “the new
Constitution for Nigeria should seek to give the people of this country a genuine and
thoroughly consistent democracy,” and lamented that the methods of distribution of
franchise and grants and representation on the various levels of government being
proposed “violate the fundamental principles of democracy.”891
Critiques from the center and left of the center point to the shortcomings of the
proposed new constitutions and to what had become mainstream politics of selfgovernment and the discourse of the “nation” and of citizenship in terms that negatively
impacted the framings of the new constitutions. Some parties, like Adunni Oluwole’s
Self-Government Fiasco Party in Nigeria, were created to oppose the grant of
independence altogether for these colonies given the terms in self-government was being
proposed and endorsed by the mainstream. The name of the party itself was an open
indictment of the circumscribed terms in which independent statehood was being
discussed and sought for. The resolution of the social issues were deemed by social
radicals to be as important as, if not more important than, the grant of independence
itself. Mokwugo Okoye, an ex-Zikist, touched on some fundamental issues of concern to
the social radicals in regard to mainstream construction of the nation-state and notions of
citizenship when he wrote to Azikiwe, lamenting what he perceived to be Azikiwe’s lack
of concern for issues of popular concern and social change, thus:
You may not realize it, but nationalism is no longer enough
in the modern world of interdependence and social welfare
and may in fact be a cover for atavism or swindle. What we
want today is a vital social ideal for which to live and labor
and a mechanism that will ensure the equitable distribution
of the fruits of our labor.892
Political organizations and parties such as NEPU, FRK’s NWU and Commoner Peoples’
Party, Eyo Ita’s and Alvan Ikoku’s United National Independence Party, the SLPIM in
Sierra Leone, etc., represented alternative construction of the nation-state and notions of
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citizenship to that of the mainstream in certain significant ways. Their failure to gain
center stage notwithstanding, these alternative discourses, organizations, and political
parties were significant in pointing to other possibilities, and perhaps to a vision of the
nation-state and of citizenship that was socially transforming and more democratically
based.
The following chapter examines to some extent the contrasting discourse of the
“nation” and notions of citizenship, i.e., the supplementary- discourse, of colonial social
radicals to those, i.e., the master-discourse, that became mainstream in the late 40s and in
the 50s.
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Chapter 7
Colonial Social Radicals and the Making of Categories into “Nation”: the
Supplementary-discourse
Introduction
This chapter seeks to examine aspects of colonial social radicals’ discourse of the
“nation” and notions of citizenship, involving their attempts to reformulate rights and
entitlements, and to make categories of, i.e., ethnicity, class, gender, religion, into
“nation” in mutually-inclusive terms in their social and political practices. It seeks to
examine their discourses and practices in opposition to what was becoming the dominant
discourse privileged by the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs. The colonial social radicals
contested the differences among citizenry that were ordered by class, religion, gender,
and other logics of centeredness and marginalization inscribed in mainstream
construction of the “nation” and notions of citizenship. They sought to create a new kind
of community based on citizenship conceived of as a kind of “fraternity of equals” and “a
deep horizontal comradeship”893 and premised on the realization of equality before the
law and to become an underlying principle for social, economic, and cultural action.
This chapter also explores British officialdom’s reaction to the social radicals and to their
form of social intervention. The labeling of colonial social radicals by officialdom as
“communist” and officialdom’s attempts to constrain them through this and other forms
of containment served to undermine the colonial radicals and their socially relevant
intervention.
II
The Colonials Not Worth Working With
Who were the colonial social radicals and what were they saying and doing about
the nation and citizenry? These were the Pobee Bineys894 and the Anthony Woodes895 of
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the Gold Coast, the Nduka Ezes,896 Raji Abdallahs,897 Mokwugo Okoyes, 898 Osita
Agwumas,899 and Michael Imoudus900 of Nigeria, etc., - all labor-socialist-oriented;
middleclass feminists like Funlayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria, Constance CummingsJohns of Sierra Leone, and Mabel Dove of the Gold Coast; path-breaking Islamic
feminists such as Hajiyya Sawaba Gambo901 of Northern Nigeria; native intellectuals like
the Islamic Mallam Ringim,902 Mallam Lawan Dambazair,903 and Muda Spikin Darma904
of Northern Nigeria, etc. They came from different walks of life: from among the ranks
of trade unionists who evinced a form of labor socialism, from the ranks of native
intellectuals, imbued with radical Islamist reformist fervor; they also came from the ranks
of Western educated, middleclass women, and the handful of Islamic feminists, etc.
They stood in opposition to the dominant social forces in their colonies, i.e., Native
Authorities, African politicians and aspirant political incumbents, etc., as well as the
British colonial authorities, contesting and reconfiguring received understandings of
rights and duties, entitlements, etc., and the institutional structures/constitutional
arrangements that upheld these in inequitable ways.
In general, colonial social radicals sought to privilege the discourse and politics of
social change and social transformation at the center of national discourse. They
privileged anti-hegemonic discourse and program of political freedom and social justice.
They tended to be the more ideologically inclined and more predisposed to attempting a
“class” analysis in the understanding of the colonial situation and to their program of
social change and discourse of the nation and citizenship.905 The intellectual origin of
many of these radicals was mixed, deriving from indigenous forms of radicalism - in
particular, Islamic reformist tradition - Christian tradition,906 diasporic Black militancy,
as well as Western and international revolutionary tradition in Marxism-Leninism and its
variants.907 They drew on a mixture of these traditions - radical, Marxist,908 womanist,
and indigenous ideals, etc. – in imagining and propagating new and distinct visions of
society. To the British colonial authorities, opposed to the framing of the nation or
society in socially radical terms, and afraid of colonial radicals’ alliance with the
international left, the radicals were the “colonials not worth working with,” i.e., the
“extremists” and “communists” - the refuseniks, and the people of “the party of we don’t
agree.” Officialdom would seek to close the space for their form of social intervention.
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Their vision of society and its citizens, including the ways they hoped to achieve their
imagined new community, were perceived by officialdom as socially destabilizing and
threatening to empire.
As revealed in chapter five, British officialdom had reconstituted their categories
of the “responsible” African and the “communist.” This had involved the further
distinction, on the one hand, between erstwhile colonials who were labeled by colonial
officials as “agitator” and “communist,” etc., such as Nkrumah and Azikiwe, and, on the
other hand, those perceived as doctrinaire and die-hard “agitators” and “communists.”
The former were being rehabilitated in official mind and included in the ranks of the
“respectable” and “moderates,” officials being careful to note, for instance, that a man
like Azikiwe could be of some use.909 Those believed to be insistent on pursuing socially
radical agendas and the immediate grant of self-government, on the other hand, remained
in official mind as the “extremists” and “communists,” etc. Anthony Woode, for
example, a socialist-oriented labor leader in the Gold Coast, was deemed to be “one of
the worst of African extremist agitators.”910 These were, in official reckoning, the
colonials not worth working with. The colonial social radicals examined in this chapter
belong to this official category and within officialdom’s anti-communist grid.
It can be said that where the radicals of the 30s and 40s, such as Azikiwe and
Nkrumah, were politically radical and socially conservative, the radicals of the late 40s
and 50s were politically and socially radical. Many of the latter were Nkrumah’s and
Azikiwe’s former fellow-travelers but who continued, or were perceived to continue to
steer a more doctrinaire course even when it was reasoned by the more mainstream
African politicians that the British colonial power was already effecting perceived desired
political changes through new constitutional provisions from the turn of the 50s.911 The
social radicals were closely watched and monitored on the official radar and officialdom
would seek to alienate and structurally exclude them. These attempts also involved
making difficult for them the chances of their participation in the colonies’ representative
institutions such as the Legislative Councils, a cause and effect of their proclivity to
extra-institutional means of making their voices heard. Officialdom would seek in
particular to undermine the radicals through the help of African politicians like Nkrumah
and Azikiwe who by early 50s were beginning to enter into these institutions and were
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acquiring political power.912 They were prevailed upon to use their new powers and
offices in party and government to expel the social radicals - also now being labeled by
these political entrepreneurs as “communists” or “communist sympathizers” - from their
political party and from government offices.913
In general, colonial social radicals sought to effect in their practices and through
extra-institutional means what some other critics of colonial society and of the
shortcomings of the on-going constitutional changes, progressives like Eyo Ita in Nigeria
and the later I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson in Sierra Leone, sought to effect through
constitutional or institutional means alone in the late 40s and beginning 50s. 914 While
Eyo Ita, for example, was able to offer his alternative views and recommendations on
constitutional change and nationhood from within official institutions by presenting his
own minority report at the constitutional review conferences,915 colonial social radicals
took to the street, to the countryside, and to the market place, etc., to make their views
known and to mobilize the citizenry in defense of their perceived rights. The radicals
sought to galvanize the grassroots to make their voices heard and their presence felt in
any proposals for change in the institutions by which their lives were being reordered.
They sought to sustain the resolution of grassroot issues and grievances at the center of
political discourse and national agenda. Mokwugo Okoye, an ex-serviceman who
became the Secretary-General of the Zikist movement,916 wrote in his memoir about “the
revolutionary agitation by Zikists” at the time and of how they tried to carry out political
education among the working people and in the rural areas.917 He recorded that
revolutionary groups were formed in many towns and that there seemed to be a
considerable degree of favorable receptivity to these. As a result of the Zikist agitation,
students’ strikes broke out in Lagos, Onitsha, Ibadan, and other places. Okoye said it was
not difficult to recruit members for their movement because “Nigerian youths were
waiting for just such an organ.”918
Some of the colonial social radicals were exposed to the communist movement,
mostly indirectly through its front organizations, and to other leftwing-oriented
organizations and individuals abroad, including the African diasporas in Britain and in
the U.S., but so also were some of those classified by officialdom as the “moderates” and
the “responsible.” Although elements of Marxism-Leninism were reflected in the
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formulation of some of the colonial social radicals’ discourse, they were not leftwing or
“communist” as officials would like to perceive them to be. Marxism-Leninism was
articulating with labor radicalism, militant Islamism, and different forms of indigenous
radicalism to produce counter hegemonic and contesting discourses among the social
radicals but it was without its effective assimilation into these other cultures of
radicalism.919 Nevertheless, some of them did try to bring their albeit limited
understanding of Marxist and leftwing revolutionary doctrines to their analysis of the
social situation in their territories and to their politics and discourse of community and
notions of citizenship. Nduka Eze, a leading labor radical activist in Nigeria in the
period, reminiscing later on the events of the time in the post-World War II era, recalled
the important role of ex-servicemen in shaping their radical perspective. These African
ex-servicemen had themselves been exposed to the influence of British leftwing
intellectuals in the army during the war. Eze wrote that hitherto their complaint was
purely about conditions and that they had no positive complaint against the paternalism
of the British administration, “but now, the new doctrine drew attention to new facts.”920
He mentioned that these men incited the labor leaders to take 'positive' action and that
many ex-servicemen were later to be among the most militant Zikists.921 Women radicals
who had had direct and indirect exposure to leftwing ideologies similarly also tried to
apply the insights they had gained from these doctrines to the understanding of the many
dimensions of women's perceived alienation and to seek to change the norms that had
marginalized them in colonial society.
Colonial Social Radicals and the Making of Mutually-inclusive Categories
Women Radicals
Women radicals attempted to reconstitute the categories of gender, as well as of class,
ethnicity, religion, etc., into “nation” in inclusive and more democratic terms in their
discourse and in their social and political practices. They contested prevailing gender
norms and sought to shift/reconfigure in their perceived interest gender norms which
under colonialism had undermined women’s status,922 such as the division of labor into
gendered reproductive and productive roles,923 and to sustain the emancipatory aspects of
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colonialism on women’s status, such as the removal of marriage restrictions imposed by
community elders.924 Women radicals organized against measures and norms that
subordinated and marginalized them and sought to discursively change these as well as
the gendered terms in which the “nation” was being constructed by African ethnopolitical
entrepreneurs. They sought to create, discursively, the space for women’s political
agency as equal citizens and to remove the various kinds of constraints that had
subordinated them and excluded them as players in their own rights in society. They
challenged the exclusionary gender norms and “containment” in the women’s wings of
mainstream political parties that had also served to marginalize them.
In their imagining of community and citizenship, women drew on actually
existing cultures, along with radical, Marxist, womanist ideals to imagine and propagate
new and highly distinct visions of social justice and gender equity. Women organized
against male domination drew effectively on pre-colonial methods using customary forms
of resistance such as the use of the calabash, ‘sitting on a man’, symbolic references to
female genitals in songs and performance arts, etc., to express their dissatisfaction and
their rejection of the ruler or of prevailing perceived unjust practices, as the case may be,
and to construct new gender norms.925 In their March against the Afin, the Alake’s
Palace, on the 29th and 30th November, 1947 the AWU women totaling over 10, 000
during their demonstrations and sit-ins against payment of taxes, swore by their vagina,
what was revered in that culture as the symbol of women’s fertility, singing: “Ori Obo ni
obi yin eyin okunrin. Ori Obo ni olu yin eyin okunrin.”926 (translated: You men came
into the world through the vagina. The same vagina will see the end of you - you male
oppressors).
As post-colonial feminists have pointed out, the indigenous woman’s body
became a crucial site of contestation during the colonial era - among both women and
men.927 New meanings were reclaimed for women’s bodies and as symbols of resistance
and opposition.928 British and French imperialists and white suffragists’ part-justification
of imperialism on the need to redeem suffering indigenous women was turned on its
head. Colonial powers saw the veil in Algeria, widow burning – the Sati - in India, etc,
as emblematic of a whole range of customs that kept women subordinated to men in these
places and had positioned themselves as champions of these women. Women activists
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reclaimed the veil in the Algerian anti-colonial struggles against France929 and British
opposition to clitoridectomy helped make female genital cutting a site of early nationalist
mobilization in Kenya, for example.930
Women radicals also drew on new forms of organization, creating unions, and
mass women’s associations to privilege more inclusive and popularly-based notions of
community and citizenship. They were committed to realizing their goals through
political action – through both institutional and extra-institutional means, i.e., social
movements. Cummings-John of Sierra Leone, Funlayo Ransome-Kuti931 and Hajiyya
Sawaba Gambo of Nigeria, and other such select women radicals were deeply committed
to politics as means of effecting social change and, specifically, positive change in the
position of women. Constance Cummings-John’s Sierra Leone Women's Movement
(SLWM) was aimed at the emancipation of Protectorate as well as Freetown women in
Sierra Leone. Like the other women’s organizations, the SLWM's two main goals were,
specifically, “to enhance the educational, economic and social status of women,” and to
seek their “representation on official and non-official bodies concerned with the
educational, social and economic welfare and advancement of Sierra Leone.”932
Hajiyya Sawaba Gambo
In the North of Nigeria, Hajiyya Sawaba Gambo, the then President of the
Women's Wing of NEPU in 1951-52, was exceptional among the extremely few women
radicals in Northern Nigeria, if not alone, in her discourse of society and citizenship as
encompassing social, political, economic, and legal rights, and in fighting for the
emancipation of women in that extremely patriarchal and stratified Islamic society.
Gambo attempted to reconstitute the categories of religion, gender, ethnicity, class, etc.,
in mutually-inclusive terms in her discourse and social and political practices.
Reminiscing on her career as a political activist in Northern Nigeria in the 50s, Gambo
said she fought against the injustices of the traditional system in the North, partisan
religious politics,933 the continuation of Northern Nigerian women in purdah, as well as
for the enfranchisement of women934 – all the disadvantages to women that the NPC
party stood to perpetuate and on which it was also predicated. Gambo stood to directly
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challenge the representation of Northern society as one, i.e., “One North,” “One
religion,” etc., in the Native Authorities’ and NPC political party’s discourse and to
unmask the inherent inequities within that society. For this and in her outright
commitment to the cause she fought for, she came under constant retribution by the
ruling authorities in the North. Sawaba Gambo’s efforts were remarkable in her defiance
of convention to fight for women’s rights in a society where patriarchy was reinforced
and sanctioned in even more entrenched ways by a ruling ideology based on Islamic
principles. Her views of appropriate gender norms were diametrically opposed to those
of the Northern Authorities and of their party, the NPC whose views Ahmadu Bello
symbolized when he expressed that giving women the vote or such rights would be
socially destabilizing and “revolutionary.”935
In my interview with Sawaba, a very warm and amiable person still full of radical
vigor, she recalled her tireless efforts to fight for the cause of women and to educate rural
women especially of their rights. Speaking in colloquial English, she mused that, “if you
don't know book you fit know your rights,”936 i.e., even if you are not literate, you should
know your rights. She was multilingual and saw issues in national terms. She spoke
English and two of the three main Nigerian languages: Yoruba and Hausa. For her
radical views and tireless activism on behalf of women and the nation and of social
change in the North, Gambo said she was constantly jailed by the Native Authorities.
“Prison was my second home,” she mused, and went on, “they think I will shut my mouth
when they let me out of prison but each time they let me go, I come out and immediately
start talking and fighting for women again and then they take me straight back to
prison.”937 She was not afraid of being put back into prison or of being beaten, she said,
because she perceived the cause she fought for as more important to her than her life.938
Conspicuously displayed on the wall of her house during my interview with her was her
dictum: “Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah be he slain or be he victorious on him we
shall bestow a vast reward.”939 “They jailed me like sixteen times between 1950 and
1951, beat me mercilessly with 90 strokes of koboko,940 whipped me every morning in
front of the alkali judge,”941 she continued. “One time I was pregnant with child and they
still beat me. It was so bad I just collapsed on the ground. They rushed me to the
hospital for operation and my womb was taken out,”942 she bravely but painfully recalled.
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While Gambo was of a more humble origin and her radicalism informed by her
Moslem faith, Funlayo Ransome-Kuti943 and Constance Cummings-John944 were of
middleclass origins and Christians. But they reached outside their more privileged status
to also embrace grassroot issues and issues pertaining to less privileged women and
similarly conceived of community and citizenship in all-embracing and inclusive terms.
In her quest for democracy in the government of Egbaland, Abeokuta, and in her
envisioning of community and citizenship in inclusionary terms, FRK stated that:
When popular discontents have been very prevalent, it may
well be affirmed that there has been generally something
found amiss in the constitution or in the conduct of
government … This is an age of liberty, an age of franchise
and brotherhood, when rulers should give way to popular
opinion.945
The women radicals were careful in their own organizations and parties to ensure
that women of all social backgrounds were represented in the decision-making bodies and
processes of these organizations, unlike the norm in mainstream political parties. They
would not let the lack of Western literacy prevent illiterate women from taking up highranking positions in their organizations. They were all committed to the politics of
inclusiveness and grassroot democracy. Cummings-John would insist that all women
members of SLWM tie headscarves during their demonstration as a symbol of
fraternization with the dress habits of most of these women and as a symbol of solidarity
and unity with all women.946
Cummings-John, like FRK and other such select women radicals, believed in
bridging the gap between all classes and all “ethnic” groups in their envisaged new and
independent nation-states. Rather than join the Creole ethnically-composed National
Council, though a Creole,947 she joined ranks with the Sierra Leone Protectorate Party
(SLPP) led by Milton Margai, in her drive for political inclusiveness of all constituent
groups. This was also an attempt to bridge the gap which the 1951 Constitution
perpetuated between the Creoles of Freetown and the Protectorate people. WallaceJohnson, now a member in the Sierra Leone Legislative Council and as Organizing
Secretary of the West African Civil Liberties and National Defence League had protested
against this potential divisiveness in the 1951 Constitution as one of the shortcomings of
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the new constitutions being enacted from the 50s onwards.948 Funlayo Ransome-Kuti in
Nigeria, likewise in her drive for national unity and representative government, did not
allow her Yoruba ethnic origin or nationality to deter her from aligning her AWU
movement with the Ibo-identified NCNC instead of the Yoruba-based Egbe turned AG.
She perceived the NCNC to be more progressive and more unifying. 949
Women radicals and the movements and organizations they led were not without
their own inner contradictions, as with other colonial social radicals and social forces.
Within these organizations, as the case of the AWU reveals for example, inherent lines of
fractionalization surfaced even among women as new opportunities arose for gaining
political power and influence as well as access to the nation’s resources.950 Other
interests and forces within the women’s organizations served to undermine the broader
and more democratic goals of these organizations. Women radicals’ attempt to create
National Societies would also intersect with officialdom’s and the ethnopolitical
entrepreneurs' nation-forming in rather mutually-exclusive terms. Colonial authorities
and African politicians alike would try to exploit the contradictions and differences
within women’s movements and organizations to undermine them and would succeed to
a large extent in doing so. Some women in the AWU, like Remi Aiyedun, were receptive
to the offers for advancement being made to them by colonial authorities and the now
reinstated Alake Ademola in Abeokuta. These offers and overtures were meant to break
the potential cohesiveness of the women and to undermine FRK, in the particular case of
Aiyedun, in FRK’s insistence on achieving the goals of grassroot democracy. Thus, the
British colonial authorities would attempt to separate, among the women also, the
“moderates” and the “respectable” from the “extremist” and the “communist.” Women
like Remi Aiyedun were discursively constituted as the “respectable” and were
differentiated from the “extremists” and the “communists,” the ranks in which
officialdom sought to collapse women radicals like Ransome-Kuti and Cummings-John.
Women Radicals and British Officialdom’s Category of the Communist
Women radicals’ known links with leftwing individuals and organizations abroad
served to validate, in officialdom’s mind, their perceptions and/or labeling of them as
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communists. Colonial officials would remain watchful and apprehensive of the activities
of these women radicals, as they would with other perceived “agitators” and
“communists!” However, in spite of these women radicals’ exposure to leftwing-oriented
international figures and movements and their efforts to draw on Marxist ideals to
propagate new gender norms and women’s rights, they were not communists or
communist-oriented.
Indeed, some of the women radicals have not only had early connections with the
international leftwing movements and exposure to variants of Marxism-Leninism, they
also continued to maintain an on and off contact with communist-affiliated organizations
like the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in their own organizations
in their colonies. Both FRK and Cummings-John had at some stages of their political
socialization been exposed in varying degrees to the contemporary international radical
and leftwing-oriented movements and organizations and to communist politics in direct
and indirect ways. A biographical sketch of Mrs. Cummings-John951 shows varying
degrees of exposure to, and active involvement in radical and leftwing organizations at
home and abroad. She was a member of the WAYL in Sierra Leone (1938-1939), the
League of Colored People (LCP), and the International African Service Bureau (IASB)952
in London, and the American Council on African Affairs (ACAA) 953 founded by Paul
Robeson and Max Yergan who were self-proclaimed communists in the United States.
As Denzer reported, she joined the latter organization from 1946 to 1951 in spite of
warnings from her distinguished step-brother in the United States as to the risk of
association with such leftwing organizations which were on the government's black
list.954
The varying exposures of these women to leftwing-oriented movements and
radical organizations had also helped to sharpen their insights into the nature of alienation
and inequities in colonial society. Denzer noted in the case of Constance CummingsJohn that her participation in radical movements in postwar America deepened her
resolve and sharpened her insights.955 There is also evidence to show that they
maintained some form of association with leftwing women's organizations and
movements abroad even when they returned home and formed their own movements.
Cummings-John’s SLWM became affiliated with the Women's International Democratic
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Federation (WIDFA) based in the Soviet Union. Funlayo Ransome-Kuti's AWU and,
later, the NWU also maintained contacts with the WIDFA and was represented at one of
the WIDFA meetings on 15th February, 1949 by one Theos O. Ogunkoya.956
Furthermore, the AWU in 1949 agreed to observe the communist WIDFA’s March 5
Women’s Day. They resolved, among other issues, that:
The Nigerian Women's Union, Abeokuta Branch,
wholeheartedly agrees with the decisions set out by the
W.I.D.F.A. at their last conference and fully support the
idea that March 5 be set apart as Women's day in the whole
world.957
Their albeit tenuous connections with leftwing/communist organizations thus
became further cause for officialdom’s concern about them. However, any careful
analysis of their movement and the trajectory of the career of these women radicals will
reveal that their connections with international radical and/or leftwing-oriented
movements were fleeting and somewhat peripheral and did not translate into leftwingoriented politics or discourse of social transformation in the colonies for them.
Cummings-John might have left Sierra Leone an anti-colonialist and returned “a radical
Pan-Africanist and nationalist,”958 as Denzer rightly observed, but she certainly did not
return a communist nor later become one, except in the perceptions and imagination of
colonial officials.
These women were social radicals in their own right and not revolutionaries or
communists. They sought to work for change in their colonies using both institutional
and extra-institutional means. Although they did not self-consciously describe
themselves as social radicals, except perhaps for Hajiyya Gambo,959 their discourses and
practices, particularly in regard to their idea of society and citizenship and the
emancipation of women, tied to the desired changes they sought in their societies, were to
varying degrees socially radical and transforming. They initiated and led movements in
which women membership and leadership were significant and waged a struggle in which
women’s agendas were sought to be placed at the center of national discourse and agenda
as well. What some critics of the proposed 1951 constitutions for Nigeria and Sierra
Leone, for example, saw as lacking, such as the provision of popular franchise, and
sought to change within the acceptable channels of official discourse,960 women radicals
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tried to realize these for women and for other perceived disadvantaged segments of
society by organizing and taking to the street.
In spite of the remarkable efforts of these women radicals to organize in quest of
democratic change and to reconstitute gender norms in more equitable terms, especially
at a time when the discourse of change was also being privileged at the level of the
colonial state, women remained largely marginalized then and in post-independent
African societies, however, until more recently. Gender roles did not become radically
changed in these West African societies. Even in such places as, for example, Zimbabwe
and South Africa where liberation struggles took the form of armed struggle and women
entered the arena of struggle as armed soldiers, thus transforming the roles of women in
such contexts and undermining conventional gender practices, gender roles failed to be
permanently transformed in those post-liberation societies. Although liberation
movements often mobilized, trained, and politicized women, and promised to address the
question of women’s liberation with independence, they did little to address women’s
issues once in power and decidedly ignored patriarchal relations in the private sphere.
When liberation movements came into power, there is a return to traditional gender
norms and women’s exclusion from political power.961 Geisler notes, for example, that
when liberation movements came to power, women were generally restricted to being
“dressed in party colors singing and dancing praise songs for the male leadership, raising
money and support.”962 It has taken newer international and national initiatives such as
the United Nations Women’s Conference in 1972, the international women’s
movement,963 non-governmental organizations, regime change in Africa and the turn
towards multiparty democracy in the 1990s, etc., to begin to change gender identities,
relations, norms, and political practices in post-colonial African nations.
The internal contradictions within women’s organization in the period under study
was also a source of weakness. For example, the formidable AWU in Abeokuta, Nigeria,
on the one hand and at one important level, reveals the potential ability and power of
women to unite for collective action in a more modern setting and in making a difference.
On the other hand, however, it also reveals the potential weakness of such organizations
and efforts, related in part to mutually-divergent interests of social forces that composed
these organizations and the kinds of alliances they engaged in and which militated against
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the actualization of their potential strengths.964 Women radicals began to make what
were perceived to be strategic alliances of their organizations with what were becoming
mainstream political parties, alliances that would in the end only serve to continue to
constrain against women radicals’ goal of putting women’s issues at the center of
national agenda. Cummings-John allied the SLWM with the SLPP and FRK allied the
AWU with the NCNC. As noted in chapter six, the discursive space for women in these
mainstream parties was highly constrained and women failed to meaningfully impact
these male-dominated political parties’ agenda, even though they had aligned with them
as political parties or organizations in their own right and added considerable
constituencies to them. FRK would even later affiliate the NWU, transformed from the
AWU, and, later, her own political party, the Commoner People’s Party, with the
Northern NPC party in 1959, in spite of the latter’s staunch conservative base! Perhaps
she felt that was the only realistic way of working for inclusiveness and as a tactical
move on her part at a time when the NPC was the party in control of the Nigerian Central
government. She would later regret her move to form such a coalition with the NPC and
would pull out of that coalition within a short period of time. “Perhaps I am not a
politician,” she later reflected.965 These women had perhaps believed in their ability to
impact these parties from within in the direction of social change. At best, they could be
said to represent the voice of conscience within those parties, that minority, i.e., the
supplementary, that insinuates itself into the terms of reference of the dominant discourse
and “antagonizes the implicit power to generalize, to produce the sociological
solidity.”966
Islamic Radicals
The Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) 967
Militant Islamic discourse, i.e., the supplementary-discourse, as represented in NEPU,
best existed as a critique from within the mainstream itself, challenging its inherent
inegalitarianism.968 NEPU also represented at its best a symbolic matrix used to
construct demands against both the ruling traditional elites and the colonial state in the
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period under examination. NEPU radicals, like other colonial radicals and their
organizations, sought to make the categories of religion, gender, class, ethnicity, etc., into
National Societies. While NEPU may not have succeeded in transforming the status quo,
it impacted it in contesting the narrow and exclusive terms in which the “nation” and
citizenry were being imagined and privileged in the dominant discourse among
ethnopolitical entrepreneurs.
The Northern Element Progressive Union (NEPU) represented the salient radical
organization in the otherwise conservative and patriarchal Northern Nigerian society and
attempted to fundamentally change the norms in this society. NEPU was founded in
Kano on August 8, 1950 based on the emancipatory precepts of militant Islam.969 Its
ostensible purpose, initially, was to operate as a political vanguard within the broader but
more conservative Northern Peoples’ Congress (NPC) which was then a more or less
cultural organization but the conservatives in the NPC soon worked to exclude NEPU
from it.970 Powerful emirs and certain administrative officers regarded the NEPU within
the NPC then, with its radicalizing initiatives, as a dangerously radical group and sought
to eliminate the radical elements from the NPC. NEPU was founded with the objective
of fighting for the emancipation of the Talakawa – the peasantries and the ordinary man
and woman in this society - from the constraints of the feudal social structure of the
emirate system which the British Indirect Rule system had largely preserved and
perpetuated in many ways.971 Part of its motto Yama (freedom) symbolized three
freedoms - political, economic and social. It was a program that directly challenged both
the traditional rulers and the colonial authority.
At its formation in 1950, NEPU combined the rhetorics of radical Islamic
reformist tradition and those of Marxism-Leninism to declare the existence of ‘class’
struggle between the talakawas and the Native Authorities in Northern Nigeria. In its
“Declaration of Principle,” and defense of the rights of citizens in this society, the NEPU,
calling for social change, proclaimed that:
The shocking state of social order as at present existing in
Northern Nigeria is due to nothing but the Family Compact
rule of the so called Native Administration in their present
autocratic form.972
It went on to declare that:
211
Owing to this unscrupulous and vicious system of
administration by the Family Compact rulers, there is today
in (our) society an antagonism of interests, manifesting
itself as a class struggle, between the members of the
vicious circle of the Native Administration on the one hand
and the ordinary 'Talakawa' on the other.973
In its imagining of a new kind of community and citizenship predicated on brotherhood
and equality, it envisioned, as part of its guiding principle, that:
This antagonism can be abolished only by the emancipation
of the Talakawa from the domination of these conduits, by
the reform of the present autocratic political institutions
into Democratic Institutions and placing their democratic
control in the hands of the Talakawa for whom alone they
exist.974
The NEPU proclaimed its aims to be based on upholding the interests of the
downtrodden, the alienated, and the dispossessed - the impoverished talakawas - against
those of the ruling and wealthy few in this Islamic society. Its central philosophical
underpinnings and ideological orientation, predicated on the defense of the interest of the
ordinary men and women and the transformation of the Native Authority system in
Northern Nigeria in socially inclusive ways, were opposed to those of the Northern
Peoples Congress (NPC).975
In NEPU’s program and discourses, Marxism-Leninism was resonating with
militant Islamism in seeking to create a linkage between social inegalitarianism and the
pursuit of “class” interest and in seeking to effect social change and a more egalitarian
society from an envisaged struggle between the classes. In their ideal forms, MarxismLeninism and radical Islamism could be said to find meeting points in their stated
vehemence against “class” oppression and capitalist greed (accumulation of wealth in
Islam) and selfish individualism, their stated concern for lack of community ethos in
capitalism, and their advocacy of the pursuit of the interest of the community over that of
the individual. For example, the bulk of NEPU's political verses and songs, championed
by Mallam Lawan Dambazair, a versatile poet and legal adviser to NEPU, strongly
denounced sharp discrepancies in wealth and ostentatious living.976 Islamic radicals in
NEPU believed that the ethical ideals of equity, justice, and freedom could be realized in
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Northern Nigerian society and in the Nigerian nation at large for all citizens in this ideal
type of society.
However, the idea of equity, justice, and freedom was not so clearly defined
especially in NEPU radicals’ attempt to apply a class analysis. The northern Islamic
society in which they operated, like the rest of these colonial societies, was indeed not
amenable to a simple class analysis that NEPU and the other radicals attempted to apply
to them. Class analysis among the radicals tended to oversimplify the forms of social
relations that colonial subjects were engaged in, given those ties that cut across the class
divide, even while “class” issues remained pertinent. The difficulty of class analysis is
evident in such societies in flux where horizontal and vertical lines crisscrossed in quite
complex and contradictory ways. In the Northern Nigeria Islamic society, shared
allegiance among many to a common Islamic faith which sanctioned a form of
enlightened despotism cut across horizontal lines of division that may be based on
class.977 The 1953 crisis in Kano reveal how those lines of affinity were actualized to
ensure allegiance of important segments of the talakawas to the NPC party and to the
Native Authorities’ cause.978 Also, while militant Islamism was resonating with the
language of Marxism-Leninism in NEPU’s discourse, it was not effectively assimilated
into the culture of Islamic protest movements or into the idiom of the ordinary people to
whom NEPU’s program of social change was directed. Notions of class struggle, or of
the rule of the common man, were foreign to the worldview of many of these talakawas,
steeped in the culture of Islam that dictated obedience to the rulers and to receiving
largesse from the “divinely” privileged wealthy,979 i.e., the Weberian ascribed status. But
NEPU remained significant and popular, nevertheless.
NEPU represented a serious attempt to redefine the political culture and norms in
this Northern Nigerian society in more egalitarian ways. Its program for local
government reforms involved a serious attempt at establishing grassroot democracy. It
envisaged the setting up of democratic village councils, district councils, and town or
urban councils as units of self-government and the councils to be directly under the
Minister for Local Government in the region. NEPU sought to amend the Native
Authority Law No. 4 of 1954 which it felt “has accumulated all power in the hands of one
man”980 and to make it more consistent with “the democratic aspirations of the
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people.”981 The Nigerian government has adopted this form of grassroot democracy in its
latest constitution and is attempting to seriously pursue it as one means of trying to
resolve the crisis of citizenship and problem of governance in post-independent Nigeria.
NEPU also sought to reorder gender norms in more equitable terms. Its
followership included women in the North who otherwise would not have had any venue
at all to attempt to empower themselves as a few tried to do. Even the rights of
prostitutes were defended by NEPU. In April, 1951 a meeting was called to launch the
Northern Women’s Association.982 At a subsequent meeting of the Kano branch of
NEPU on 6th May, 1951 the decision was made to encourage women prostitutes in the
North to form a union and to advise such women to appeal to the Supreme Court in all
cases in which they were convicted by the Native Courts on account of their profession,
citing the fact that “under English law harlots cannot be imprisoned.”983
NEPU had significant followership. Radical Moslem scholars and their disciples
were very important in setting up the NEPU movement all over the Northern Provinces
and in propagating its goals among the commoners in the pre-independence period.984
Islamic intellectuals and activists within the organization, such as Mallam Illa Ringim, a
Moslem scholar, and Muda Spikin Darma, an Islamic poet, evoked passages from the
Koran, traditions and sayings of the Prophet Mohammed, and certain historical practices
and attitudes of tolerance and piety by early Moslem Caliphs to construct radical social
texts of their own. They sprinkled political speeches with religious allusions, allegories,
images and justifications. Most of them wrote poems which dealt with social concerns.
Both Illa Ringim and Muda Spikin Darma approximated to the ideal radical type in their
unwavering commitment to the cause they fought for. Ringim, a poet, social analyst,
political activist, orator, and a freedom fighter, lived and practiced chiefly as a Koranic
scholar. His biographer, Beita Yusuf Ahmed, claimed that he was regarded as a born
radical with a lasting commitment to fighting for the truth. He said he was characterized
as a man with a passion for justice and freedom and with a total commitment to fighting
for the liberation of the peasantries and of Nigeria and Africa from foreign domination.
Ringim was imbued with a belief in the total emancipation of one's immediate
communities in order to liberate Africa as a whole.985 His commitment to the cause of
NEPU, i.e., the cause of the common man and of the nation, remained total to the end of
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his life, in spite of series of imprisonment and other forms of persecution he suffered
from the ruling elites.986
Beita Yusuf Ahmed commented that on the whole, NEPU, more than the NPC,
substantially contributed to the remarkable politicization of the peasantry in Northern
Nigeria and that regional mobilizers or spokesmen like Mallam Ringim were to be
commented for their persistent awakening of the rural folks, thereby taking party politics
to the grassroot levels.987 NEPU’s Declaration of Principles stated that “this
emancipation must be the work of the Talakawa themselves.”988 It was set up to be a
political movement of commoners, i.e., petty traders, small producers, farmers, artisans,
youths, and women all of who played substantial roles in the organization. It tried to
successfully apply Islamic and traditional symbols in building its base of membership and
in trying to advance its cause989 which involved the political education of the peasantries.
NEPU and British Officialdom’s Category of the Communist
NEPU was an organization that British officialdom perceived as communist, including its
leadership. It was a label that the British applied to NEPU more out of their fear of its
growing importance and what it represented than any real influence of communism on it.
Right from its inception, the British had ridiculed it as an “invented political society” and
its members as “extremist group.”990 But NEPU was developing in the early 50s and
gaining in importance as a viable alternative political organization that was addressing
important social issues in the North of Nigeria – issues of inequity, women’s
marginalization, corruption, and nepotism as existed in the Indirect Rule Native
Authority system under the Emirs. The NPC, on the other hand, sought to sustain the
status quo and the hegemony of the ruling elites and its privileges that NEPU was seeking
to abolish. The NPC, along with the British colonial authorities, remained opposed to the
NEPU and continued to hold it in derision. For example, after the interview between
NEPU’s representatives and the British Resident of Kano Province on 25th June, 1951
regarding NEPU’s objections to the elections under the new 1951 Constitution, the
Resident wrote to the Secretary of the Northern Provinces in Kaduna and indicated that
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he was giving a fairly detailed account of the meeting because ‘it reveals the attitude of
mind of extremist group in Kano.’991
In spite of official opposition to NEPU and officialdom’s attempts to reduce its
significance through negative labeling, however, NEPU continued to gain popular
support and to grow in strength. The British Resident in Kano, Northern Nigeria, could
not help but to subsequently acknowledge NEPU’s growing importance and credibility as
an alternative political organization and movement in the North of Nigeria. He had to
admit, in his own words, that NEPU’s “strength lies in its campaign against corruption
and nepotism,” and that “it represents an organized body of political opinion in the
North.”992 Nevertheless, the tendencies towards official labeling and categorization of
NEPU and its members in derogatory terms and as communist would remain enduring.
British officialdom insisted on perceiving NEPU as an “extremist” organization.
Although the British colonial authorities, unable to deny any longer the legitimacy or
deep resonance that NEPU was having in the North than they had acknowledged or
would want to admit, would be forced to acknowledge NEPU’s growing and substantial
strength occasionally,993 they would remain opposed to NEPU and would seek to
undermine it because of its growing importance and not in spite of it. This is because of
the challenge it posed to the hegemony of the British and that of the Native Authorities in
Northern Nigeria. Sklar noted that the transformation of the NPC into a political party in
1952 to become a suitable instrument for the use of conservative politicians was possibly
the immediate consequence of electoral victories by the NEPU in the primary stage of a
protracted general election through a system of electoral colleges.994 British colonial
officials affirmed the intention of the NPC party and Native Authorities in the North,
consistent with their own position, to adapt and not to destroy the traditional system of
authority which NEPU sought to reform or transform. The NPC, along with British
officialdom, were therefore determined to do all they could to neutralize NEPU as an
opposing political force. One way this was facilitated was through the pitfalls of the
1951 constitutional provisions which gave capacity to NEPU’s political opponent, the
conservative NPC party, while it constrained against NEPU’s ability to continue to thrive
politically.995 Another was through labeling. Through labeling as “extremist” and
“communist,” officialdom was fairly able to delegitimize NEPU’s and other challenges to
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the ways they and African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs sought to remake African
societies.
NEPU and the social radicals that composed it were, indeed, like many colonial
radicals and their organizations, exposed to the international leftwing currents of ideas
and their discourse of the nation and citizenship was influenced, perhaps to more limited
degrees, by these. Through Western-educated and semi-Western educated radicals in
NEPU like Raji Abdallah who headed both NEPU and the Zikist Movement at varying
times, elements of Marxism-Leninism had penetrated NEPU’s discourse. Many of these
Western-educated NEPU radicals were non-Northerners from the then Middle Belt and
from the South of Nigeria and had had some direct or indirect contact with international
communist and leftwing movements. Through them, NEPU was brought into contact
with international organizations such as the World Congress of Defenders of the Peace in
Paris with which it maintained some links.996 In a letter to the President of the
Committee of World Congress of the Defenders of Peace in October, 1950 the Secretary
of NEPU, Bello Ijumu, confirmed receipt of the letter from the Bureau of the World
Committee of the Defenders of Peace at Prague, dated August 18th, 1950 to NEPU.
Ijumu informed him that NEPU fully endorsed the proposals laid out in their Appeal for
the 2nd World Congress of the Defenders of Peace.997 The letter went on to reiterate some
of the issues that NEPU engaged with and were believed by NEPU to be of similar
concern to the World Congress:
The World cannot plan for a stable peace when half of its
population enjoy freedom and the other half wallows in
bondage. The African continent in particular is a great
challenge to the conscience of World leaders who only
think of us as raw materials for the furtherance of their
design.998
NEPU was also linked with WASU in London and through WASU with the left in
Britain such as Fenner Brockway. NEPU regularly communicated with them to inform
them of developments in the colony as well as of their concerns. In a 5th July, 1951
telegram to Fenner Brockway, for example, they informed him of some of the
retributions they were suffering at the hands of the Native Authorities. The telegram
read: “Northern elements progressive union members live in danger certain section of
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community alleged instigated by native authority.”999 NEPU was also in touch with the
World Festival of Youths and Students for Peace in Berlin.1000
Though in contact with some of these leftwing-oriented organizations and
individuals, neither NEPU nor other such radical-oriented colonial organizations were
communist or known to be representative of communist front organizations. NEPU and
many of the colonial social radicals and organizations were more democratically oriented.
However, colonial officials would collapse them into their anti-communist grid and
would remain watchful of their movements and fearful of their perceived potentials for
communist-style agitational politics and insurgency.
Labor Radicals
Labor radicals were foremost in contesting mainstream discourse of the nation
and notions of citizenship and in seeking to reconstitute these in mutually inclusive and
socially transforming terms. They also sought to move developments in the colonies
along the paths of more rapid and fundamental change. Trade union leaders like Nduka
Eze of Nigeria, Pobee Biney and Anthony Woode of the Gold Coast, and Wallace
Johnson of Sierra Leone were notable in these endeavors. They sought to effect changes
in their societies through organizing for direct political action with workers as central
actors.1001 It was these labor radicals in the Gold Coast, for example, not Nkrumah, who
at the turn of the 50s remained pivotal in trying to resolve popular discontent through
labor protest movements such as occurred in the Gold Coast Trade Union Strike and the
Positive Action in January, 1950. Through theirs and other labor radicals’ dual and
strong presence in both the Gold Coast Trade Union Congress (GCTUC) and the CPP,
and in Nigeria in the Nigerian Trade Union Congress (TUC) and the NCNC, for example,
the quest for change and immediate self-government in the Gold Coast and in Nigeria
became widespread among the grassroots.
Unlike Azikiwe and Nkrumah with whom these labor radicals had been in
previous close association but like other social radicals such as the Islamic native
intellectuals and women radicals, they tried to sustain the agenda of social change at the
center of national discourse. While Azikiwe and Nkrumah could be said to have
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identified with the culture of labor radicalism at certain important stages of their career,
they evinced a certain practicality1002 - or political correctness - that these social radicals
failed to do. Azikiwe and Nkrumah were able to make strategic shifts to the ideological
center as dictated by the turn of events at the end of the 40s and beginning of the 50s in
order to gain political leverage and power at the state and national levels. They were
ready to do so and actually did so at the expense of the radical constituencies that had
provided them with important political base and legitimacy and which had sustained them
till then. The growing disconnect between them and their former radical bed-fellows
resulted in recriminations and counter recriminations between them. It also involved
Nkrumah’s and Azikiwe’s expulsion of the radicals from the political parties they led –
the CPP and the NCNC - as their own power position became more entrenched in the
50s.1003 The radicals, on their part, were opposed to Azikiwe’s and Nkrumah’s shift to
the center, calling them opportunists, while Azikiwe and Nkrumah, on the other hand,
condemned the perceived die-hard position of these radicals.
Officialdom was fearful of labor activism and its believed destabilization of
colonial society. As examined in chapter three, labor radicals, along with returning
overseas students, were the most feared in the colonies by colonial officials as direct
source of communism in the colonies. The resonance of Marxism-Leninism in the
discourses and activism of labor radicals and official proof of some form of contact
which they had with leftwing organizations and movements abroad were further
validation to officials of the influence of the latter on them.1004 The rhetoric of MarxismLeninism was indeed resonating in labor radicals’ discourse but it was also without its
effective assimilation into the developing culture of workers’ protest in these West
African colonies. As earlier noted in regard to the weakness of “class” analysis, the
element of class which formed an important philosophical underpinnings of MarxismLeninism was diffused in these colonial social formations, apart from MarxismLeninism’s own weakness as an analytic tool in these and other societies. Nevertheless,
Marxism-Leninism was part of the intellectual origin of colonial labor radicals and they
did attempt to draw on elements of it to constitute their discourse of the “nation.”
Applying the “new doctrine,”1005 i.e., Marxism-Leninism, in imagining the future of his
country, the labor radical and the then Deputy President-General of the Zikist Movement,
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Osita Agwuma, in his public lecture titled a “Call to Revolution” on October 27th, 1948
and in what has become the famous “Seditious Lecture” in the annals of Nigerian preindependence history, called on the workers and the masses to rise up in strikes and revolt
against the government and to make demands for self-government.1006 He bitterly noted:
“My country has for over a century been panting under the oppressing heels of British
imperialism,”1007 and went on to state that:
Thirty to forty million inhabitants of my country … labour
and toil to answer to the needs of their oppressor who is
backed up by crude force. They are economically
strangulated and they starve in the midst of plenty. The
potential wealth of our fatherland is being drained steadily
and relentlessly while we are assigned to an inferior status
in what they hypocritically call a commonwealth of
families.1008
Communism’s own direct intellectual origin in Marxism-Leninism and colonial officials’
association of labor radicals and other colonial radicals with communism in the colonies
made the language of Marxism-Leninism,1009 however crudely applied by these colonial
radicals, to be suspect by officialdom and to carry more significance than it deserved.
Because they straddled both the trade unions and some of the political parties
before they were expelled from these parties, some of them in leadership positions in
both, the impact of labor radicals was more immediately and deeply felt in the colonies.
In Nigeria, for example, the Zikist left1010 maintained a strong presence in both the trade
union movement and in the NCNC till the end of the 40s and the beginning of the 50s for
some, and likewise the labor left in the Gold Coast trade unions and the CPP. Nduka Eze
at a time held leadership positions as the first Secretary of the Zikist Movement,
Secretary of the Amalgamated Union of the U. A. C. African Workers (UNAMAG), and
Secretary of the newly formed Nigerian National Federation of Labour (NNFL), as well
as membership of the NCNC Cabinet in Nigeria at the same time. In the Gold Coast,
labor radicals in the Gold Coast TUC and in the CPP were crucial in the staging of the
Trade Union Strike as well as the Positive Action that occurred there in January 1950.1011
Both occurred, in spite of the CPP President, Nkrumah’s attempts to temporize on the
staging of the Positive Action. The “tail wagged the dog,” Sir Arden-Clarke, the Gold
Coast Governor, would later comment, in agreement with the Acting Colonial Secretary,
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Sir R. Saloway, who had sought the intervention of Nkrumah to put a stop to the
proposed Positive Action.1012 Nkrumah was unable to stop the planned Positive Action
as the initiative had been seized by the labor radicals and the rank and file CPP who
hoped to force the issue of immediate self-government for the Gold Coast on the colonial
government. At the forefront of both movements were Pobee Biney and Anthony Woode
and the other Gold Coast labor radicals, with a foot in both the world of the TUC and the
CPP. The presence of the labor radicals in both the GCTUC and the CPP in the Gold
Coast and in the TUC and the NCNC in Nigeria served to radicalize the culture of both.
The labor radicals had developed from within the womb of more mainstream political
parties, such as the NCNC in Nigeria led by Azikiwe, and the CPP in the Gold Coast led
by Nkrumah, and had desired to radicalize these parties from within. These attempts,
however, would begin to alienate them from the party leadership at the turn of the 50s in
the light of changing political fortunes for these parties and their leadership as they began
to meet and to benefit from officialdom’s expectation of moderation. They could not
long subsist in these parties because their contrasting discourse of the nation and notions
of citizenship in socially radical terms contrasted with, and challenged those of the
leadership of these parties. From the early 50s onwards, both colonial officials and the
leaders of both political parties, Azikiwe-led NCNC and Nkrumah-led CPP, instituted
reactionary measures against them, including expulsion from the parties. These measures
served to undermine them and to decimate their ranks.
The labor radical Zikists in the NCNC are examined in the next section.
The Zikists
In Nigeria, labor radicals in the NCNC were instrumental in the creation of the Zikist
movement and in effecting a shift within the movement towards more radical
politics and the discourse of the nation and citizenship in socially transforming terms.1013
The movement was inaugurated within the umbrella of the NCNC on 16th February,
1946 and was composed of many young men and women - trade unionists, exservicemen, teachers, and students - eager to carry out active political propaganda. Raji
Abdallah,1014 the President-General of the Zikist movement at its inauguration, threw
some light on the Zikist philosophy of action when he declared in 1948 in his famous trial
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for presiding over what the colonial government regarded as 'seditious' lecture by Osita
Agwuma,1015 that: ‘We have passed the age of petition. We have passed the age of
resolution. We have passed the age of diplomacy. This is the age of action - plain, blunt
and positive action.’1016 The Zikists believed in direct political intervention to bring
about social change.
The radical Zikists, like the NEPU, made serious attempts to reconstitute the
discourse of the nation in mutually-inclusive terms and to seek to redefine the form and
content of the Nigerian political culture in more egalitarian ways at the end of the 40s
before they were proscribed by the colonial government. Mokwugo Okoye, an exserviceman who became the Secretary-General of the Zikist movement, wrote of
appalling conditions in the village and in the city which provided fertile grounds for their
radicalizing work:1017
Soil erosion and the use of primitive methods in agriculture
naturally led to food shortage and mass exodus from the
villages of the able-bodied youth. But life in the cities was
not as rosy as many of the fugitives had expected, what
with inflation and the ogre of unemployment to stare them
in the face; in the villages themselves, deprived of most of
their vivacious youth and the frescos, festivals another
customs that once added lustre to native life, life became
duller, hunger stalked the land and epidemics broke out in
one district after another, baffling an unimaginative
government. 1018
The initial goal of the Zikist movement when it was established was to radicalize
the NCNC from within but the more leftwing-oriented radicals in the Zikist movement
soon effected a shift within the movement to present it as a more viable alternative to the
parent NCNC organization itself. Labor radicals who comprised the leadership of the
Nigerian trade unions also comprised the leadership of the Zikist movement and in
particular, its leftwing, and their influence was felt in both. These included Nduka Eze,
Mokwugo Okoye, Osita Agwuna, and Raji Abdallah. Nduka Eze was the first secretary
of the Zikist Movement and had at the same time risen to a position of power and
influence within the Nigerian labor movement as both secretary of the Amalgamated
Union of the U. A. C. African Workers (UNAMAG) and of the newly formed Nigerian
National Federation of Labour (NNFL), as noted earlier. Sklar commented that Eze’s
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object since 1946 had been to link the labor movement to the Zikist Movement for
revolutionary action.1019 In 1947, Eze had facilitated the affiliation of the Nigerian Trade
Union Congress with the NCNC, a successful move which eventually won him a position
as a member of the NCNC Cabinet but he would later be expelled from the Cabinet. In
1949, Eze became Acting President of the Zikist Movement. His stature rose immensely
by mid-1950 with the merger of the TUC and the independent Government Workers
Union with the leftwing-oriented Nigerian National Federation of Labor (NNFL) to form
a united central organization, the Nigerian Labor Congress (NLC) under leftwingoriented leadership. Nduka Eze assumed the post of secretary of the NLC. 1020 Eze
reached the pinnacle of his career when in 1950, he led the 18,000 member of the
UNAMAG in an effective strike against the United African Company (U.A.C.) which
resulted in substantial increase in the cost of living allowance for the workers.1021 His
beginning decline, however, started four months later. In January 1951, Eze joined the
Freedom Movement, led by ex-Zikists who had renounced Zikism for “revolutionary
socialism.”1022 Eze, Agwuna, and a select few colonial social radicals came closest to
being the “revolutionaries” that officialdom feared. Nduka Eze, for example, applied the
language of Marxism-Leninism and its variants more outrightly. Osita Agwuma initiated
the “revolutionary” program within the Zikist Movement, with admonition to prepare for
physical sacrifice, even death, for the sake of fighting for freedom.1023 In his celebrated
speech, “Call for Revolution” of October 1948 for which he and a number of other Zikist
leadership were jailed, he had proposed youth internationalism.
The Zikists tended to draw more strongly on the language of Marxism-Leninism
in their discourse of the nation.1024 At the movement’s last conference in 1950, before it
was banned by the colonial government, the resolutions passed revealed the radical
Zikists’ intent to move the colony’s political process along a left of center course, if given
the political space. Their vision of a future independent Nigerian society, as seen in the
conference resolutions, embraced the ideal of a West African Socialist Union, the
nationalization of the basic industries, direct action against imperialism, and extensive
development of the cooperative movement. These resolutions remained more on paper,
however. But they nevertheless served to affirm officialdom’s perception of the Zikists
as extremist and as “dangerous to the good government of Nigeria.”1025
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British colonial officials had all along had a very negative opinion of the Zikists
and the Zikist Movement, as they did of NEPU and its leadership. The Zikist Movement
was regarded as aimed “to stir up hatred and malice and to pursue seditious aims by
lawlessness and violence,” and its purposes and methods as “dangerous to the good
government of Nigeria,”1026 etc. The secret document from the Colonial Office to J. K.
Thompson of the British Embassy in Washington in 1950 stated that the Zikist
Movement had been, right from the start, and I quote at length:
An extremist movement with a tendency to violence …
appears to have become the refuge of young semi-literate
junior employees of Government and of other organizations
who are actuated by envy in two senses, in that they envy
any European because of his apparent wealth and because
of his superior intellectual ability … they preach the need
for the break-up of existing order in order to rebuild a new.
It is far from clear what they would intend to rebuild but it
is quite clear what they intend to destroy …1027
A spokesman in the British Embassy in Washington also reported to the New York-based
Amsterdam News that the Zikist Movement was “a splinter party of ‘extremists’ which
broke away from the NCNC.”1028 British officialdom subsequently moved to disband
them on April 13, 1950 after a series of disturbances in which the Zikists were implicated
and for which many Zikists were jailed. The government proclaimed the Zikist
movement an unlawful society and was banned.1029
The radicals in the Gold Coast Convention People’s Party (CPP), like the radical
Zikists in the NCNC in Nigeria, also attempted to radicalize the CPP from within and to
try to move it left of the political center. These were also composed mostly of trade
unionists who espoused a form of labor socialism. They had pushed for Positive Action
against the colonial establishment in January 1950 at a time when the leader of the party,
Kwame Nkrumah, like Azikiwe in Nigeria, was becoming predisposed towards working
with the colonial authorities. Both Nkrumah and Azikiwe had perceived such positioning
to be politically expedient at the turn of the 50s because proposed constitutional changes
and newly-enacted constitutions were creating openings and opportunities for political
advancement, based on cooperation with British officialdom.
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At a time when colonial officials were beginning to look for effective “moderate”
African leaders they could work with and Nkrumah was beginning to make important
shifts in order to work with the system and to gain political power, the radicals in the CPP
such as Anthony Woode and Pobee Biney continued to seek to push the CPP to the left of
the center in their desire for grassroot change and immediate grant of political
independence. Colonial officials were fearful of such perceived intransigent and
“extremist” actions and position. The radicals in the Gold Coast as well as in Nigeria
were closely followed and watched by officials and attempts were made to effectively
exclude them structurally, i.e., from membership of the CPP and NCNC, as well as from
institutions that potentially conferred power and prestige, such as the colonies’
Legislative Councils. Officials sought and got the cooperation of leaders of these
political parties, Nkrumah and Azikiwe, to this effect.1030
Breaks to Radicalism: Structural Limitations
The colonial authority, in trying to “guide” change in the late 40s and beginning of the
50s, sought to create breaks to the development of radical politics and to close the space
for the discourse and imagining of the nation and citizenship in socially transforming
ways as the radicals were attempting. One of the ways officialdom sought to do this was
to remove political capacity from the radicals as means of containing them.1031 This
involved direct and indirect measures. One way this was done was to exclude the
radicals from institutions that conferred power and influence, such as the Legislative
Councils, as noted above. For example, the retention of the principle of nomination in
the 1951 Constitutions for Northern Nigeria and the Sierra Leone Protectorate, places
where the principle of indirect rule through Native Authorities was still dominant, served
to undermine the ability of NEPU and progressive organizations in the Sierra Leone
Protectorate, such as the Kono Progressive Movement (KPM) in the diamond area of
Kono, to remain effective political forces in Northern Nigeria and in Sierra Leone.
Officialdom’s actions also involved their encouragement of leaders of what was
becoming mainstream political parties to expel the radicals from their party, including
their dismissals from government posts, etc. Officialdom’s attitude towards radicalism
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and perceived “ideologues,” equated with extremism and communism, remained the
same – to be feared, watched, and silenced. By the end of the 40s, the British colonial
authorities were out to cultivate the “respectable” African,1032 as they tried to make
changes from the top, and to include this category more and more in the machinery of
government by granting capacity to them. As these new categories of Africans acquired
some degree of recognition and power from the British colonial authorities, they were
used in turn to create breaks to the development of radicalism in colonial society by
encouraging them to take actions against the “communists” within their political parties.
As leader of Government Business in 1954, Nkrumah had made the government’s
position on communism clear even against members of his own party when he announced
in the Legislative Council Session of 25th February, 1954, for example, that any person
who had been proved to be an active communist would be refused employment in the
public service.1033 He followed this by the expulsion of “communists” from the CPP.
These included his former compatriots like Anthony Woode and Turcson-Ocran, the
General Secretary of the Gold Coast Trade Union Council.1034 Ironically, it was the very
activism of these radicals and the fear of them by colonial officials that had been partly
contributory to officialdom’s decision to open up the system to the “moderates” and to
such “radicals-turned-moderates” like Nkrumah himself!1035 Nkrumah in government
further worked with colonial officials in the Gold Coast to ban the possession of
communist or pro-communist literature believed to be dispatched in bulk to trade union
leaders and private individuals. The banned publications were reported to include those
of the World Federation of Trade Union (WFTU) and the World Federation of
Democratic Youth (WFDY), including those of other communist-affiliated
organizations, as well as English-language publications emanating from Eastern Europe
and the Soviet Union.1036
In Nigeria, state actions and constraints against the chances of any socially radical
politics and intervention involved more reactionary measures in the North. The attempts
by the few women radicals and radical organizations such as the NEPU to raise political
consciousness at the grassroot level and among women, in particular Moslem women in
the North, and to change the status quo met constantly with strong resistance from the
ruling authorities - the Emirs of the Native Authorities system. The radicals there were
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imprisoned, beaten, and expelled from their jobs in the Native Authorities, etc. The
handful of radicals like Mallam Ibrahim Illah Ringim and the radical women activist,
Sawaba, documented or spoke of how they were constantly jailed for their activism and
political beliefs and of how prison became to them a second home.1037 Such punishment
was also to deter other social activists and women from following in their footsteps.
Mallam Ringim recalled the many felt injustices, hardship, and cruelty he and his
family suffered at the hands of the Native Authorities in the North as a result of his
political activities and his membership and leadership position in NEPU.1038 He recalled
how, at one time, the Kano Native Authority which had complete jurisdiction over the
town of Ringim where he was based seized his farm and those of his supporters and sold
them to the Nigerian Railway Corporation without any compensation given to them. He
reported in his memoirs that:
To fight for my rights and those of my townsmen, I
instituted a legal action against the Kano Native Authority
in the Emir’s Court, which was at that time presided over
by the late Alhaji Abdullahi Bayero, the then Emir of Kano.
During the trial, my detractors informed the Emir that I was
a member of NEPU. For this reason the case was
subsequently struck out and I was chased out of the Emir’s
court; no land, no compensation, simply driven out with
ignominy.1039
He further reported on how he was always severely beaten up and imprisoned without
trial many times. Even members of his family were not exempt from some of these
reported cruel treatment. He stated that his brother and his daughter were all beaten up at
various times for no offense other than that they were part of his family. He recalled the
fate suffered by his daughter at one time and his own travails in the efforts to get justice
for her thus:
One evening of Ramadan, I sent my daughter to buy me
some gruel. Certain supporters of the NPC beat her up
severely, on the ground that her father happened to be a
member of NEPU (a rival party to NPC). When I brought
an action for damages to the court the judge simply went
into his house and came out with a cutlass and started to
shout for help that I came to kill him with a cutlass. That
very night I fled to Kano on foot, a journey of fifty miles
from Ringim.1040
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The exercise of state power in this manner by the ruling elites in the North of
Nigeria did indeed make it difficult for organizations such as the NEPU which was
grassroot-oriented and also pro-women's emancipation, to continue to effectively sustain
its attempts at creating mutually-inclusive categories. It made it difficult for NEPU to
continue to make any significant inroads in helping to change the status of commoners
and women in this society.1041 For example, NEPU seemed to be making a headway in
forming a Northern Women's Association at its initial meeting on 25th April, 1951 at the
Colonial Hotel in its headquarters in Kano. This inaugural meeting was reported to be
enthusiastically attended by about 60 women of “mixed tribe.” Although 40 were Ibos
and other Southerners, the remaining 20 were Hausa-Fulani Northern women.1042 From
this meeting, a number of Northern women were reported to have been chosen to be
members of the interim executive of the proposed Women's Association. However, by
the time a second meeting was held on 2nd May, 1951 to consolidate the grounds for the
formation of the Association, attendance had declined considerably. Among important
reasons for this decline as cited in the Police Report was the fear of retribution from the
Emir.1043 The Report says that:
Amongst the Northern women there was some trepidation
regarding the probable reactions of the Emir as he is wont
to order from time to time women of the class who formed
the majority of the first meeting get married within 7 days
or to leave Kano.1044
Many people – men and women – were indeed deterred from joining any organization
that threatened the status quo especially in the North where they suffered great retribution
and punishment, especially in the hands of the Native Authorities.
The colonial government also came hard against any radical organizations or
movements directly by decimating their ranks, i.e., through imprisonment, “buy-outs,”
transfer to another state as they did with Aminu Kano, or simply by banning such
organizations as against law and order, as they did with the Zikist movement in 1950.
The Zikists movement was announced banned by the government Order in Council, No
19, dated April 13, 1950 under section 62 of the Criminal Code.1045 Before then, the
government had also been decimating their ranks by jailing many of the leaders and
members on alleged crimes of sedition. In 1948, on the alleged charge of sedition and
subsequent trials of many Zikists implicated in this charge, many of the Zikists received
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various terms of imprisonment ranging from six months to nine months and some for
much longer. For example, Mokwugo Okoye, the General Secretary of the Zikist
Movement at the time, was jailed 33 months, and Francis Ikenna Nzimiro, the then 24year old president of the Onitsha branch of the Zikist movement, was also sent to prison
for nine months, both of them on allegation of possessing seditious pamphlets and
publications.1046
Critique of Radicalism and the Radicals
The radicals’ attempts to reconstitute community and notions of citizenship in
more inclusive and socially transforming and progressive terms failed to occupy or be
sustained at the center of national discourse in the period under study. Their failure to
fundamentally change the status quo in the pre-independence period was due to a variety
of interrelated causes. A major reason was British officialdom’s reaction against them in
conjunction with opposition and measures against them by African ethnopolitical
entrepreneurs, as noted earlier. Another major reason were the objective conditions in
these West African colonial societies which acted as breaks to the success of the politics
of social change and social transformation in the terms in which the radicals were seeking
it. A countervailing force to the success of any politics of social transformation in these
places was tied to the inherent contradictions of colonial society1047 and of the radical
spectrum itself which the radicals failed to transform, as noted in earlier chapters.
A major contradictory element was that of class. While the discourse of “class”
and the related issue of inequities, etc., that the radicals sought to privilege in their
discourse and practices were pertinent as serious political issues, the category of class as
an analytical concept was not successfully conceived by the social radicals in the form
that reflected the social realities or the forms in which it was manifesting in these colonial
social formations. “Class” elements were articulating with other elements or analytical
categories in quite complex forms. For example, while on the one hand new forms of
social stratification was emerging based on the acquisition of wealth, western education,
etc., on the other hand, the “class” divide was being mediated and blunted by other ties
of, i.e., religion, gender, etc., by which people were connected, as already revealed in
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earlier chapters.1048 In such contexts, class as a category of practice and/or of analysis is
a problem to be confronted and analyzed, as also indicated earlier. The West African
colonial social radicals did not succeed in confronting the problem of class as a category
of practice or as a tool of analysis of the colonial situation and for social change. The
category of class presented a problem for political organizations or movements such as
those of the social radicals which sought to mobilize people, especially the
disenfranchised, on the basis of class divide. On the other hand, these divisions and
inequities were being exploited and perpetuated in the discursive practices of
ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, as this study has also attempted to reveal. “Ethnic,”
“religious,” “gender,” and other categories were being appealed to and used as instrument
of “nation-forming” by the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs. As Brubaker noted in regard to
the performative and group-making practices of ethnic entrepreneurs, categories of
ethnopolitical entrepreneurs are for doing.1049 African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs’
making of categories of “ethnicity,” “gender,” “religion,” “class,” etc., into “nation”
served in important ways to shape the self-identification of many colonial subjects in this
period. Identification with particular struggles among the rank and file of colonials was
often made on non-class lines even when class-related issues were important components
of this. In many instances, we find the ranks of the “privileged” being augmented with
the ranks of the “non-privileged” to fight a similar coalition of forces from other
communities or regions, even when the gains might be limited to a more narrowlydefined interest group within each coalition. In the 1953 crisis in Kano,1050 Northern
Nigeria, categories of “religion” and “ethnicity” were successfully applied by the
Northern ruling authorities/NPC elites and in ways that sublimated any “class”
differences between them and the mass of the Hausa-Fulani peasantries to whom they
turned for support and who they rallied against the Southerners and Southern politicians.
This served to give the conservative NPC party the advantage as the planned rallies by
Southern politicians in Kano had to be cancelled as a result of the volatile situation there.
The oppositional discourse against the Southern politicians and Southerners in the North
also served to create a wedge between Northerners and Southerners in the North and in
the nation. The divisiveness and hatred along “ethnic/religious” lines climaxed in the
pogrom against Ibos (Southerners) in the North less than a decade after independence and
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quickly led to the Nigerian civil war in the second half of the 1960s. The appeal of the
National Symbolic1051 undercut that of “class” and class divide.
The radicals also suffered to some extent from the romanticism and idealism that
characterized utopian-type movements. After his expulsion from the NCNC in 1955,
Mokwugo Okoye, an ex-Zikist would write, “As I go, … I trust that our country shall yet
produce able, true and brave sons and daughters who can effect her deliberations and
usher in the socialist millennium we all visualize today.’1052 It was not so much the
desire to create a new social order based on social justice and equity, but a question of
how well conceived this was as praxis and what the chances were for success. In British
West African colonial societies, if it may be agreed that there were ingredients for
radical/left of center politics, it is not certain that there were sufficient ingredients to
facilitate the success of such politics. Part of the radicals’ inability to succeed, apart from
the very persistent and fairly successful attempts of the colonial state to constrain them,
was their own failure to confront the challenges as well as the limits to radical/leftwingoriented type politics in the West African colonial social formations. They sought new
political possibilities in a social structure and within an ideological framework that
constrained against these possibilities in their very contradictions and without being able
to successfully resolve these contradictions in their discourse and social and political
practice.
The radicals could also be said to lack a proper appreciation in their own society
of the levels of what Gramsci analyzed as the relations of forces to succeed politically. In
his theory of passive revolution which he specifically directed to his study of bourgeois
national movements in the late 19th century Europe, Gramsci identified three moments of
the political situation or levels of the “relations of forces” that provide limits to fighting a
“war of movement.”1053 These are: the objective social structure, the level of the
development of the material forces of production and the relative positions and functions
of the different classes in production, and the relation of political forces and of military
forces.1054 The importance of Gramsci's analysis is in pointing to the relevance of
adopting appropriate strategy by any aspiring social force or class, in his case, the
national bourgeoisie in conditions of a relatively advanced world capitalism, and in the
case of this study, the radical social forces in colonial capitalist society in flux, for
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political success in a given situation. In Gramsci's analysis, he distinguished between the
choice of waging a war of movement and waging a war of position. Colonial radicals
and would-be leftwing were seeking to wage a war of movement where the conditions
were not sufficient for such to succeed and/or where they were unable to transcend the
challenge of the cultural imperative.
The radicals lacked a proper appreciation of the role of culture as a signifying
system, “the signifying system through which necessarily … a social order is
communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored.”1055 As Raymond Williams has
also attested, culture has two aspects: ‘the known meanings and directions, which its
members are trained to; the new observations and meanings, which are offered and
tested.’1056
The social radicals lacked an understanding both of the fairly successful
manipulation of the cultural dynamics by the political entrepreneurs and cultural
producers, as well as of how they could have successfully applied them in their own
efforts to create new societies predicated on democratic principles. The political
entrepreneurs and cultural producers, in their own case, were fairly successful at evoking
the symbols that marked the boundaries between them and “others” in their very
ambiguities to compel to action. Abner Cohen has noted that boundaries are marked by
symbols: “objects, acts, relationships or linguistic formations that stand ambiguously for
a multiplicity of meanings, evoke emotions, and impel [people] to action.”1057 The
Native Authorities in the North were able to use these symbols to good effects in the
1953 Kano disturbances as they mobilized the people against the Southern politicians in
the AG and the NCNC political parties who had gone to the North to canvass for electoral
votes.1058
Social activists like Amilcar Cabral in another part of Africa under foreign
domination succeeded where the radicals in West Africa failed by rooting praxis or his
social movement in culture as means of harmonizing divergent interests, resolving
contradictions, and defining common aims in the search for liberty and progress.1059
The radicals’ failure to recognize the challenge of the politics of social transformation in
these colonial social formations posed internal limits to the success of their politics, apart
from other constraining factors. Where Cabral concerned himself with creating unity of
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thought and action and the identification of his movement with the “masses,” the radicals
were unable to create such homogeneity of the various social categories and forces, even
though they envisioned it. Cabral stated the objective toward which he worked to
achieve political victory thus:
The political and moral unity of the liberation movement
and of the people it represents and leads implies the
achievement of the cultural unity of the decisive social
categories for the struggle. This unity takes the form on the
one hand of total identification of the movement with the
environmental reality and with the problems and
fundamental aspirations of the people and on the other
hand of progressive cultural identification of the various
social categories which take part in the struggle. The latter
process must harmonize divergent interests, resolve
contradictions and define common aims in the search for
liberty and progress.1060
It is a daunting task but Cabral nevertheless confronted it in his struggle. Cabral was able
to make categories of “ethnicity,” “class,” “religion,” “gender,” etc., into National
Societies in his discourse and social and political practices. The colonial radicals failed
to successfully do so; they therefore failed where Cabral succeeded.
Though well-meaning and imbued with varying degrees of sharp analytical
insight and critical consciousness, the social radicals failed to become a credible
alternative to the status quo and to mainstream discourse and construction of the “nation.”
They were very much a social force in flux and did not sufficiently evolve or crystallize
into a coherent alternative. Most of them rejoined political parties or organizations that
throve politically when their own organizations were officially proscribed or when they
were displaced from more mainstream political parties. This was the case with the
radicals who rejoined the AG party in Nigeria in the late 50s and existed as its left of
center wing. They tried to resurrect radical politics in 1962-63, in the immediate
independence period, and this involved a chain of events that led to the first military
coup-d’etat in Nigeria in 1965 and to the dissolution of the short-lived Nigeria’s first
Republic.1061
To conclude, although the colonial social radicals also pose a problem of analysis
and although they may not have successfully addressed all the problems of postindependent African societies, they were of crucial significance in the period under study.
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They remain so in post-independent African states’ contemporary challenge and crises of
democracy and the search for sustainable government. Colonial social radicals are
significant in two major symbolic ways. One is related to their representation of a
possible alternative path to self-governing nationhood that was not taken, and/or closed
off by British officialdom. This significance also relates to colonial social radicals’
representation as critique of the paths taken. Their other symbolic significance is tied to
British officialdom’s perception of them, i.e., the colonial social radicals, as “communist”
and the effects of this labeling by officialdom. These are central to a main thesis of this
study and its argument that the imperial anti-communist grid into which British
officialdom collapsed colonial social radicals’ intervention and other forms of social
intervention among colonials that officialdom did not like constrained against what could
have mapped out a different, perhaps more democratic terrain for the future governance
of these colonies as independent African states. Colonial social radicals remain
significant in the resonance of their imagined African society in the re-imagining of
society and citizenship among intellectually and/or socially engaged Africans in postindependent African states. Democratically-inclined Africans are seeking to open and to
keep opened the space that invested interests would rather have closed.
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Chapter 8
Radical Nationalism and Precipitous Decolonization
Introduction
This study has represented an attempt to explore the phenomenon of nationalism in
British West Africa in the pre-independence period from a reconstituted methodological
framework in order to fill a gap in the literature of this phenomenon and to provide
further understanding of the subject and of the end of empire in British West Africa. It
has attempted to focus on certain colonial social forces, such as colonial social radicals
and ethnopolitical entrepreneurs and on aspects of the contesting notions of community
and citizenship in their discourse and social and political practices and their outcome. It
has also attempted to explore the phenomenon of social radicalism and communism,
including the British imperialist category pf the “communist,” and their effects.1062 In
exploring the fear of communism in the colonies among British officialdom and their
labeling of colonial social radicals and other forms of social intervention that British did
not like in the colonies as “communist,” it seeks to reveal the ways in which this
categorization impacted the dynamics of the events of this period and the process that
ended in what this study regards as precipitous decolonization. This includes its impact
on the contestations over community and citizenship among colonial social forces. The
study posits that British officialdom’s distinction among Africans between the
“respectable”/“moderate” African and the “extremist”/“communist” African served to
legitimize the discursive practices of certain colonial social forces, i.e., the ethnopolitical
entrepreneurs, while it delegitimized those of others, i.e., the colonial social radicals, with
significant implications in the immediate pre-independence period and for postindependent West Africa. The study argues that by opening up space for the discourse
that officialdom only wanted privileged, officialdom served to facilitate and shape in
important ways the social, cultural, and political context that formed the basis of the
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Independence Constitutions for these colonies. This is revealed to largely involve the
terms of the social, political, and cultural imaginings that ethnopolitical entrepreneurs’
idea of the nation entails and which became the dominant form – the master-discourse –
but was predicated on narrower forms of cultural and political address. This study further
argues that by closing the space to colonial social radicals’ intervention and other forms
of social intervention in the period under study, British officialdom constrained against
what could have shaped out to be a different terrain, perhaps more democratic society for
post-independent West Africa.
This chapter seeks to bring to a conclusive end the salient themes in the narrative
of the phenomenon of nationalism in this study and to provide a brief historicized
reflection on what this study considers to be precipitous decolonization. It seeks to
examine the role played by British officialdom’s perceptions of communism in these
colonies and the imperial anti-communist grid on how and when empire ended there.
The study posits that the grant of self-determination to these colonies was an unintended
result of a dialectical process tied to a complex of factors and impacted in important ways
by British officialdom’s fear of communism in the colonies.
Officialdom’s Social Engineering
British officialdom’s fear of communism in their colonies and their response to
what was perceived as the radicalism of the left at the end of the 40s and early 50s in
West Africa involved taking reform initiatives that they believed would serve to reduce
the influence of colonial social radicals and the crisis of empire. One major area of
reform was through the grant of new constitutions that they believed would allow for
greater degree of discussion and participation by Africans in the affairs of their country.
Officialdom believed that with these constitutional changes, those who would be entering
these institutions would be Africans who, as revealed in chapter four, officials had
discursively constituted as “responsible” and “moderate.” They also hoped that the
chances of colonial “radicals,” “extremists,” and ‘communists,’ entering into these
institutions would be highly reduced. By seeking to open up the political space for
“moderates” through constitutional changes, officials hoped to marginalize the colonial
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social radicals and the discourses that officials did not want to have privileged. A. B.
Cohen of the Colonial Office, in defending the grant of new constitutions that they
believed would provide for “full participation” by Africans in the colonies’ governing
institutions at the turn of the 50s, had stated that “such a constitution provides the best
defense against Communism in West Africa.”1063 They would now seek to cultivate the
African “moderates” and to work with them as these began to gain entry into the
institutions of power through the openings that the new constitutions were affording
them. “A sense of responsibility can only be created by giving responsibility,” Cohen
had further commented in defense of the reforms and constitutional changes that were
being undertaken at the end of the 40s and beginning of the 50s consequent to the 1948
Gold Coast crisis.1064 Also defending the course of reforms and concession-granting to
“moderates” to stave off the “extremists,” the Secretary of State, Mr. Lyttelton, had
remarked in a Cabinet Memorandum of February 1952 that “if politics is the art of what
is practicable this course is justified.”1065
British endeavors at social engineering involved attempts to decide and define the
boundaries of legitimate discourse. The social radicals would, however, contest those
boundaries and the limits that officialdom was attempting to put on change and the
discourse of community and citizenship in quite significant ways. They sought to force
open the space that colonial authorities would rather have closed and to privilege the
discourse that officialdom would rather not have centered. Paradoxically, the social
radicals’ continued attempts to center the discourse of community and of citizenship in
the socially radical terms that officialdom was opposed to fed more and more into
officialdom’s fear of the potentials of these radicals as sources of communism in the
colonies and therefore to their continued alienation by officialdom. It furthered
officialdom’s reaction against them and against all those who officials had collapsed into
the same category as “extremists” and “communists.” Colonial officials would continue
to seek for ways to marginalize and deny capacity to these Africans, derided in various
ways as “extremist,” “misguided and mischievous,” “irresponsible,” and “communist,”
etc.1066
From the beginning of the 50s, British officialdom’s negative reaction to the
radicals and to their discourses and practices, and to the party of any whose slogan is “we
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don’t agree,” such as the NEPU,1067 also involved their continued accommodationist
response to those they perceived as moderates, largely located among the ethnopolitical
entrepreneurs.1068 The radicalism among some of the latter, exhibited perhaps at certain
stages of the trajectory of their career was more of the right and/or “political” rather than
social radicalism. The cooperation of this social force with officialdom would involve
further grant of new constitutions as part concession to them, perceived as “moderates.”
At the beginning of the 50s, these were those whom the British felt would work with
them to more effectively manage empire than their former but now largely “inept” allies,
the chiefs, could. They were also those who officialdom believed would, in the light of
the new world geo-politics and Cold War rivalry, enable them to keep their West African
colonies in the sphere of British influence then and in any future self-governing status for
their West African colonies. Perceiving these colonial “moderates” as able to retain the
colonies in the sphere of the West in the possible future, though not yet quite planned,
self-governing West African nations, the British would in the end hurriedly hand over
power to them. This involved, as this study contends, a pre-emptive move to forestall the
possibility of the Soviet Union from gaining further inroads and advantage in the colonies
should the crises of empire continue and the colonial social radicals gain the upper
hand.1069 The U. S. had already warned Western Imperial Powers of this possibility and
of the need to take pre-emptive steps by granting independence to these colonies. The
1948 USCIA Report which warned of the presence of leftwing elements in the crises in
the West’s colonies and of their “susceptibility to Soviet penetration,” as well as of the
“danger of shortsighted colonial policies,”1070 had also stressed that unless the European
Colonial Powers could be:
Induced to recognize the necessity for satisfying the
aspirations of their dependent areas and can devise
formulae that will retain their goodwill as emergent or
independent states, both these Powers and the U. S. will be
placed at a serious disadvantage in the new power
situation.1071
In continuation of his defense of the constitutional changes on-going in the four
British West African colonies and against France’s criticism that the British were moving
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too fast, A. B. Cohen, echoing similar sentiments as in the USCIA report above, wrote in
1951 that:
These reforms are based on the following principles … that
no constitution which did not provide for full participation
by Africans would have any chance of success under
present conditions in West Africa; … such a constitution
provides the best defense against Communism in West
Africa, the only chance of friendly co-operation between
this country and the West African territories and the best
chance when the time comes of securing a favorable
decision by the Gold Coast and Nigeria to stay within the
British Commonwealth (emphasis mine).1072
He also went on to say that:
Our policy has been criticized by the French as moving too
fast. We cannot for the reasons just given accept this
criticism if it means that we have gone too far in reform.1073
What his defense amounted to was that the “moderates” must be enabled and appeased
through the on-going reforms and timely grant of new constitutions that would allow
them “full” participation in government in order to have them remain West-friendly in
the future independent West African nations. This was also simultaneously to avoid what
officials believed to be the unwelcomed alternative, that is, the “extremists” taking
control and the felt more likely possibility of future pro-Soviet independent West African
nations if they did, as earlier stated.
These changes, in other words, involved a pre-emptive reformist response by the
British colonial power. A pre-emptive reformist response was not new, either, to the
British or to the other European powers. In other contexts, the fear of communist
insurgency or insurrectionary politics, or even the chance that this might happen, had
elicited similar reformist response in various ways. In the international revolutionary
conjuncture of 1917 to 1923, non-socialist governments of Western Europe undertook
bold reforms in their countries to pre-empt a revolutionary upsurge or prevent the
possibility of such developing.1074 Faced with the realities of events in the colonies at the
end of the 40s and beginning of the 50s, and the fear - real or imagined - of communism
gaining a foothold in West Africa, the British colonial power in the end took the
important step of handing over their colonies to the “moderates” before the Commies got
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a foothold in their West African colonies as they already had in other places outside the
continent.1075 The Colonial Office, monitoring Azikiwe’s activities closely while visiting
the U. S. in 1950, for example, recorded his speech to the local branch of the United
World Federalists in the Washington Daily News to the effect that “the happy note was
that the Commies had made no headway in Nigeria.”1076 However, the report continued,
recapping Azikiwe’s comment, “he warned of the possibilities if things didn’t
change.”1077
Subsequent to the conjunctures of 1948 in the Gold Coast, the British colonial
power embarked on the process of change in the colonies and would become more
responsive to the demands of the “moderates” to whom in the end they would also
concede the demand for self-government. They needed the continued cooperation of the
“moderates” in managing empire and made concessions to them before these
“moderates” became radicalized, or, “re-radicalized,” as the case may be, should the
colonial government continue to stall on, or deny their perceived moderate demands.
“Re-radicalized” because among significant segments of the “partners worth working
with” of the 50s were the hitherto officially labeled extremists, agitators, and communists
of yesteryears!1078 Colonial officials knew that among their most important working
allies now and who headed organizations and political parties now strongly represented in
government were once the officialdom’s constituted radicals and extremists of yesterday,
such as Kwame Nkrumah, Nnamdi Azikiwe. They knew them enough to the extent that
they knew they could change character again, i.e., shift their position and rejoin the ranks
of the refuseniks1079 - the colonial social radicals - and to further mass agitation and rouse
public opinion against the colonial government, especially through their press, should
their own demands not be met. The possibility of such occurrence was, however, getting
slimmer as Nkrumah and Azikiwe began to gain more political power from the beginning
of the 50s through the constitutional openings that had put them in positions of relative
power in their colonies’ governing institutions, etc. From these vantage positions, they
were able to continue to consolidate their power position as they worked with the colonial
authorities as “partners in progress.” These African politicians – the ethnopolitical
entrepreneurs - were set on staying this course while skillfully pushing the boundaries of
change gently from within.
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The Colonial Office had also observed, in 1950 in relation to Azikiwe, that:
It does not appear that Zik had any direct contact here in
London with known Communists. He says that he is still
studying whether extreme Left, Center or Right parties
would afford Nigeria most aid to freedom, but feels it is
only a question of time before Communism dominates the
world. He himself is none too confident that Communism
will be in the best interest of Nigeria but feels its
dominance is inevitable. Zik said that he, personally,
would be content with a Constitution for Nigeria similar to
that of Malta, - a diarchy, with Imperial interests similarly
safeguarded; he thought that such a Constitution would not
be granted if asked for.1080
That was in 1950. Whatever Azikiwe’s idea of a diarchy was, by 1953 Azikiwe and the
“moderates” were asking for full self-government,1081 but were still unequivocally proWest, still sure communism would not be in the interest of Nigeria. Before its dominance
became “inevitable” and Azikiwe and the rest of the “moderates” turned “the way of the
communists,” the British colonial power decided to hand over the mantle of power to the
“moderates”; the grant of full self government became an official reality in all the British
West African colonies, beginning with the Gold Coast in 1956.1082
The question is raised as to why the British decided to grant full self-government
status to their West African colonies at this time, within a short period, and contrary to
their expressed views and pronouncement and intentions till shortly before then. This
chapter seeks to address this question to some extent. The debate on decolonization in
Africa remains open-ended among scholars of the end of empire in Africa and this study
is also an attempt to shed some light on this theme by examining the role played, if any,
of the fear and perceptions of British officialdom of communism in their West African
colonies and among certain colonial social forces in the process that ended empire and at
the time it did. The rest of this chapter explores aspects of the process in which the
British colonial power suddenly relinquished their West African empire.
The Dialectic of Change
241
The study regards the grant of political independence to the British West African colonies
as precipitous and unplanned and as the unintended result of a dialectical process
involving a variety of interconnected factors, including the fear of communism in the
colonies among British officialdom and their perception of colonial social radicals as
sources of Soviet infiltration into these colonies. As late as the mid-40s, the British
colonial power was still not envisaging political independence to their West African
colonies. It is true that the makers of empire had envisaged at various times hitherto
some kind of self-governing status for the colonies. However, it remained largely vague
and in terms of some unforeseeable future, “a good many generations,” perhaps even
“centuries,” as Governor Stevenson of Sierra Leone would cynically comment to O. G.
R. Williams, head of the West African Section in the Colonial Office as late as 1943.1083
Stage five of the “Tentative Plan for Constitutional Development” drawn up in mid-1943
by O. G. R. Williams had no timetable for self-government.1084
At the very beginning of imperial occupation, any notion or discourse of self
government for the colonies was tied to the notion of Trusteeship. The colonies were
being held in trusteeship,1085 to impart Western civilization - the three Cs: Christianity,
Commerce, and Civilization - to “the People without history”1086 till such a time as they
could enter the Community of Nations. That was as far as any idea of eventual self
government that could be teased out would allow at the time. When they would be ready
to enter the Community of Nations and how were undefined. That these West African
colonies, pacified and fully occupied only by the beginning of the twentieth century,
would become self-governing in less than six decades later, was definitely not an idea
that was or could be seriously envisaged by the makers of empire at the time of
consolidation of empire; neither was it so long afterwards, even in barely less than a
decade before the grant of full self-government occurred there! As late as 1946, Rita
Hinden, the Secretary of the Fabian Colonial Bureau (FCB), was still uncertain about full
independence and self-government for their African colonies, in spite of the FCB’s strong
advocacy of progressive changes in the British colonies. In her retort to Kwame
Nkrumah during a Fabian conference in April 1946, she had declared that “British
socialists are not so concerned with ideals like independence and self government, but
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with the idea of social justice.”1087 The best that could be foreseen then was some form
of self-governing status within the British Commonwealth - but in some distant future.
It was not just the arch imperialists like Winston Churchill of Britain or Charles
de Gaulle of France who could not envisage an end to their empires, “over which the sun
never sets.”1088 Otherwise more forward-looking advocates of progressive British
administration in the colonies in Britain, including other British Fabian socialists like
Arthur Creech Jones and Herbert Morrison, were also deeply attached to the continued
sustenance of their empires in Africa as late as the post-World War II period.1089 Even at
a time when the Labor Party of which the FCB formed a significant and influential
component were in power (1945–1951) and could have been committed to carrying out
more radical changes, this did not occur.
The grant of new constitutions to the British West African colonies, starting with
the Gold Coast in 1946, two decades after the grant of the last one, was also not planned
to be a stage in the development of the colonies towards self government – certainly not
within a decade or two. In his prepared dispatch to the Secretary of State (SOS) in regard
to constitutional reforms for Nigeria in 1945, Sir Arthur Richards (Lord Milverton), then
Governor of Nigeria, stated the limited nature of these constitutional changes and the best
that could be envisaged from them as being to enable Nigerians “to secure greater
participation in the discussion of their own affairs” (emphasis mine).1090 The scheme for
the dispatch was laid before the Legislative Council on March 5, 1945 and the same
constitutional proposal was passed, with only one person, Dr. N. T. Olusoga, not
supporting it.1091 In just a decade and a half later, however, self-government occurred in
all the four British West African colonies.
Within only six decades, “Trusteeship” had changed during World War II to
“Partnership,”1092 which was revised to “inter-dependence of the UK and colonial
economic unit,”1093 and then to “self-government within the British Commonwealth,” and
thereafter to full self-government by the mid-50s. The question must be asked as to how
this rapid turn of events and policy shifts came about in what turned out to be the last
decade of British rule in West Africa? As already indicated in this study and in my
earlier works,1094 it was the unintended consequences of, i.e., the complex interplay of
events in the colonies and in the international arena, the inextricably mixed crises at the
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level of the colonial state1095 and at the level of local African society, as well as the postWorld War II Cold War rivalry between the West and the Soviet Bloc. The latter became
important prism through which British colonial power also perceived crises in the
colonies, particularly the socially relevant intervention of colonial social radicals in the
late 40s and at the turn of the 50s onwards.
The 1948 Gold Coast conjuncture is regarded in this study and in my earlier
works as a catalyst in the turn of events that resulted in the end of empire about a decade
later in these West African colonies.1096 The crisis played into British officialdom’s fear
of communism in the colonies. It facilitated the rapid grants of new constitutions and led
to a momentum that took on a life of its own, with the Gold Coast colony leading the
way. In the Gold Coast, once colonial officials were assured that Nkrumah, as leader of
the CPP, and the rest of his party leadership in government were on the path of
“moderation” and constitutionalism, they became responsive to him and to his party’s
requests for the grant of more political concessions. The pace of political change in this
colony subsequently became increased, more than was ever intended by the colonial
power. In fact, the stated preference of the Colonial Office was to go slow on the pace of
change. During the meeting of the Secretary of State with Nkrumah in the Gold Coast in
June 1952, he had warned Nkrumah in their discussion to “not ask for too much too
quickly.”1097 Irrespective of their stated preference, however, colonial officials became
more and more drawn into granting concessions to Nkrumah and the CPP party leaders in
government, preferring them to their feared alternative, the “extremists.” The perceived
radical activism and discourses of colonial radicals made the concessions to the
“moderates” more necessary.
The momentum of concession-granting was set into motion and would continue
until in the end the grant of full self-government was given to the Gold Coast even when
the British assessed that the country was not ready for full self-government, especially in
the light of its weak administrative structures. The British officialdom felt that it was the
most efficacious decision for them in the circumstance: to cut and run, hoping that
Nkrumah and his government will be able to deal with the “genie” that had been let out
of the box but which they had thus far succeeded in keeping at bay - barely! And postindependent Gold Coast (Ghana) as well as Nigeria and Sierra Leone governments did
244
have to continue to face the crises of nationhood that were already inscribed in preindependence African societies and unresolved in the Independence Constitutions.1098
The momentum of change was also sustained in spite of reservations by certain
other colonial officials, from the higher-ranking to the lowest, in the colonies1099 and in
the Colonial Office who felt the pace of change in the Gold Coast was moving too fast
for the stability of the political situation in other places such as Nigeria, and even as far
away as in Kenya. The Governor of Nigeria, Sir Macpherson, for example, believing that
Nigeria was bound to be affected by the developments in the Gold Coast, had expressed
concern at the pace and mode of constitutional changes in the Gold Coast.1100 In his
January 8th, 1952 letter to Sir T. Lloyd, the Permanent Under-Secretary of State, (19471956), Macpherson expressed how shocked he was to learn after the facts that the former
Secretary of State, Mr. J Griffiths,1101 had agreed that it would be necessary to allow
Nkrumah to win further political advance along the lines of what Arden-Clarke had just
informed Macpherson he would be asking H. M. G. to agree to.1102 He went on to
express, reacting to what he had just learnt from Arden-Clarke, that “the failure to tell us
about these conversations is very hard to understand - having regard to the great and
ever-increasing repercussions here from events in the Gold Coast.”1103 He expressed
appreciation of the challenge of the “critical situation in the Gold Coast” but implored
that “in considering what action may be necessary there to save the Gold Coast for the
Empire,” those in London should “not fail to realize that the result may be to pose the
same question for Nigeria.”1104 Furthermore, he informed that the new 1951 Constitution
in Nigeria was being well responded to there by all parties involved in working it but that
the proposed changes to the 1950 Gold Coast constitution, planned to be announced by
the Secretary of State soon, would likely upset the chances of the new constitution in
Nigeria having a favorable reception.1105 “Both political parties had decided to try out
the new Constitution,” he continued, referring to the two Southern regional political
parties in Nigeria, the AG and the NCNC, “but if the concessions proposed by ArdenClarke are given to the Gold Coast I shall have the gloomiest forebodings about the
future here,” he went on to warn.1106 “If Arden-Clarke’s programme is adopted that
becomes a pipe-dream, and we may well join the number of those colonies who have had
to fight a rearguard action doomed to defeat,” he summized.1107 A year later in 1953,
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Macpherson continued to express the same objections. In response to Sir Thomas
Lloyd’s personal letter of 5th March, 1953 to him, Macpherson wrote to Lloyd on March
16th, 1953, more or less expressing exception to the rapid constitutional changes in the
Gold Coast and to what he believed was the negative impact on Nigeria’s development,
thus:
We have held the country together and much good work
has been done. Had it not been for the constant comparison
with the Gold Coast, situation would have been very
encouraging. Southern politicians would not have felt
compelled to press for advance and would have allowed
time for the main inter-regional jealousies to be overcome.
But the Gold Coast political advance, actual and bogus, has
been a persistent canker.1108
Sir Charles J. Jeffries, the Deputy Under-Secretary of State (1947–1956), also in
1953 regarded as a “misfortune” the way constitutional developments had been allowed
to occur in the Gold Coast and had hoped that it might be their general policy to “call a
halt to this process,” as far as they could.1109 But the process could no longer be halted as
it had, unwittingly, taken on a life of its own, given the benefit of hindsight. Sir Thomas
Lloyd, stating that the repercussions of the Gold Coast’s advance on Nigeria was
inevitable, made it known to Governor Macpherson that the course of constitutional
change in the Gold Coast was set and that it would be impossible for H. M. G. to justify
to the British Parliament and before world opinion the use of force that might be
necessary should they do otherwise.1110 Recognizing what was perceived as the broadlybased demand for full self-government in the Gold Coast, the SOS, Mr. Lyttelton, in a
Cabinet Memorandum in 1953, and also in further validation of Lloyd’s point, stated that,
“if the government of the Gold Coast is to continue to be by consent constitutional
changes are inescapable.”1111 By the end of 1953, it had become increasingly clear that
the Colonial Office had committed itself to the path of self-government for the Gold
Coast in principle, if not as a fait accompli, to be extended to the rest of British West
African colonies.
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Managing Change
Changing Stasis
The British colonial government was, indeed, not aversed to making changes. In the
30s, in the aftermath of the worldwide depression and the weakening of the sterling vis-àvis the dollar as well as in the face of the crises in their colonies within and outside
Africa, they realized the need for making changes in the colonies. It led at that time to a
rethinking of empire and an engagement with the moral rearmament of empire involving
a focus on the economic development of the colonies. The Colonial Development and
Welfare Act (CDWA) enacted in 1940 was the codification of this change and focus. The
significance of African colonies had also loomed large in officialdom’s thinking in the
face of another European war which began in 1939. As the war began and dragged on,
even stronger emphases were placed on the importance of the colonies to aid the war
efforts by both the Tory and Labor governments in Britain. In anticipation of post-World
War II Allied victory, they indicated the need to make changes in order to be able to
continue to hold on to their colonies. A. J. Dawe, the Deputy Under-Secretary of State
(1945-1947), in his conversation with Reginald Coupland also of the Colonial Office,
remarked, in anticipation of Allied victory and anticipated post-World War II settlement
by Allied forces, that:
The strongest argument for resisting any attempts at a
Peace Conference to transfer our colonies to a Sovereignty
is that we are training them towards political selfsufficiency and self-government. If we make this position
clear to the world we shall be in a strong position.1112
The changes were, indeed, proposed out of an enlightened self-interest.
At the end of the 40s, the British colonial power again realized that “change there
must be,” as the SOS. Mr. Griffith stated in May, 1951,1113 especially after the 1948 crisis
of social order in the Gold Coast. The Watson Commission’s report was hinged on the
very need for change.1114 But change in official mind also meant controlled change; selfenlightened, reactive, and, paradoxically, also pre-emptive. It also contained the selfcontradictory idea of change without change, i.e. managed change.1115 New initiatives
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usually tied to the plans of economic development which aimed at making empire
economically self-sufficient and profitable were to secure empire and not the result of
any plan of political development1116 or towards the grant of full self-government for the
colonies.1117
The start of a rethinking process on policy in Whitehall and the drive towards the
moral rearmament of empire in the mid-30s did not signal the start of a policy of
relinquishing empire in Africa; it was meant to make empire more secure, meant to
achieve the opposite of what, paradoxically, occurred in the end from the mid-50s
onwards. In the late 30s and early 40s, in anticipation of Allied victory, the British took
steps to pre-empt their colonies from achieving self-governing status at the Peace
Conference of Allied Powers by embarking on a course of “development.” The intent of
the new policy of economic development was to secure empire and to retain them under
British control, not to relinquish it. Jane Bowden has revealed in her significant study of
Britain’s new developmental policy in regard to Nigeria and the Gold Coast (1935-48)
how the plans of economic development of British West African colonies in the period
were aimed at retaining these colonies in the anticipated post-World War II talks among
Allied Powers. 1118 She showed how colonial development was an important aspect of
Britain’s domestic reconstruction plans during World War II and noted that the
development of these colonies was for the purpose of control.1119 At the turn of the 50s,
British officialdom embarked on a plan to widen the base of African representation in the
Legislative and the Executive Councils and to work with them as partners in progress in
order to better secure their West African empire and not to relinquish it. The sudden turn
towards relinquishing empire was an unintended result of a process over which they had
lost control.
Control and Self-determination
The control factor in principle remained at work in new contexts in the period
under study. The British colonial power would again take steps, in the late 40s and 50s,
to pre-empt their colonies from disintegrating into chaos and from falling out of their
control and into Soviet hands. This time, however, it involved a focus on political
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development, mainly through the grant of new constitutions to allow for greater African
discussion and later, participation in their own affairs, as well as to set the boundaries of
legitimate discourse - again as a way of control. But this time, it would end in the grant
of self-government to the colonies as the contradictions of the colonial state also played
themselves out, i.e., the contradictions between economic development and political
stasis, of local authority rule (Indirect Rule) and Central government along Western
parliamentary system (two mutually divergent forms of rule in individual territories), and
of economic centralization and political decentralization. Paradoxically, the grant of selfgovernment was also meant as a way of continuing to maintain control, i.e., to retain their
sphere of influence in West Africa1120
By 1953, it was becoming quite clear to the British colonial power that they were
losing control, going especially by the events in the Gold Coast and Nigeria, and that
their hold on their West African empire was at best tenuous, especially if force was not
an option for them to use in keeping colonial society together. The alternative to force
was the continued grant of concessions to the “moderates.” As the moderates continued
to seek for more and more concessions and, ultimately, for the grant of self-government,
officialdom perceived in the end that the best way of gaining, or of continuing to gain,
influence and control in other forms in these territories was to grant self-government to
the “moderates.” These were those that they perceived would be able to retain the
colonies in the sphere of the West and of Britain after independence had been granted and
would continue to model the political institutions and governance in these states along
British liberal ideals.1121 It led, therefore, to the move to forestall their West African
colonies from falling into the hands of the “ social radicals” and into what they believed
also would be, by default, into the Communist/Soviet sphere of influence. Hence their
handing over power, precipitously, to “moderate” Africans. Full self-government was
granted by default, not as a planned policy initiative. By the time the British decided to
make it “policy,” it had become the only option available to them, given the
circumstances of the time, and of the official mind.
The contention of this study and of my earlier works on the phenomenon of
nationalism that the end of British West African colonies was not a planned process by
the British but the unintended consequence of an unpredictable process involving the
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interplay of events in the colonies and internationally, is in contradistinction to the school
of guided devolution among earlier schools of revisionist studies of decolonization in
Africa. This earlier school believed that the end of British West African empire was a
planned process by the British with whom lay the real initiative all along. Lee and Petter
in Colonial Development and Good Government, contended that Africans’ demands for
self government were of little or no consequence and rather emphasized the initiatives of
the official classes as most crucial.1122 Other significant studies in the school of “guided
devolution” have included Curtis R. Nordman’s work, “Prelude to Decolonization in
West Africa: The Development of British Colonial Policy, 1938-1947,” and R. D.
Pearce’s work, The Turning Point in Africa: British Colonial Policy, 1938–1948.1123
Also deviating from the school of guided devolution or the idea of planned
decolonization was Jane Bowden’s position in regard to official policy in the colonies in
the same period that Pearce and Nordman examined. Bowden reformulated the problem
of policy making in the period in context of the effects of the changing balance of internal
and external pressures on policy, as well as in light of the weight of colonial pressures on
metropolitan policy making. She pointed out that the interesting question in this regard
was:
Not merely why did the planning initiative occur at this
time, but what was the weight of the various factors that
had to be taken into account in the formulation of a
coherent strategy of economic and political development
because it is this that explains the direction and pace of
change.1124
This study posits that at the turn of the 40s and beginning 50s, the weight of the
crises in the colonies and of the role of perceived communist-influenced radicals in those
crises, tied to officialdom’s fear of a potential future shift of the colonies to the Soviet
sphere of influence, was important in moving officialdom along a path not planned by
them in this period - the eventual grant of independence to these West African colonies in
less than a decade. It was necessary to grant the “moderates” the request for selfgovernment as officialdom believed the latter would keep the new states in the sphere of
the West/Britain. Though the reality may be different from their perception, perception is
also reality and what the makers of empire perceived things to be became their reality and
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influenced their decision to hand over power to the colonial “moderates” at the time this
occurred. It is the argument of this study that the perceptions of British colonial
authorities of communism in the colonies and of the potentials of these colonies to fall
under Soviet control was significant in the process and the decisions that resulted in the
grant of self-government in these colonies.
As to the question of “policy” in the unpredictable circumstances of the time, it
could indeed be said that policy made itself as John Cell replied to his rhetorical question
“who made policy?”1125 In the light of lack of observed clear-cut direction or
understanding among officials high and low of the world the colonial Master sought to
create in Africa, Cell remarked that policy had made itself in the unfolding events of the
last quarter of British colonial rule in West Africa.1126 The colonial state structure itself
was in disarray and fractured internally. The crisis at the level of local African society1127
was also, at other levels, a crisis of governance, and of policy, at the level of the colonial
state. There was no clear-cut policy in many instances1128 and “policy” initiatives tended
to be reactive, in reaction to crises, and pre-emptive, in attempts to gain control of a
runaway situation in order to steer it in officially acceptable ways, or as officials would
term it, along “ordered progress.” The constitutional enactments/changes were as much a
reaction to crisis and challenges at the level of local African society as they were also
believed to be blueprints for moving the colonies forward.
The crisis at the level of the colonial state had also involved major contradictions
of British rule in these colonies: the simultaneous existence of two mutually divergent
forms of rule in individual territories – local authority rule (Indirect Rule) and Central
government along Western parliamentary system (Legislative Councils), albeit in
attenuated forms; the fractionalization of the state structure in the role of colonial chiefs
whose interest straddled both the colonial state and local African society; the
contradiction of economic development and political stasis in the era of development;
and, in what became the last decade of colonial rule, the major contradiction of
economic centralization and political decentralization. The colonial partners worth
working with of the 50s – the political entrepreneurs and cultural producers - would, in
the end, succeed in having the dilemma and contradictions of British imperial rule
reconciled in their favor, as Margery Perham unwittingly predicted at the 6th October,
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1939 Carleton meeting. She said, despairingly: “We shall probably give in to them too
soon,” referring to the African intelligentsia.1129
Social Engineering
British officialdom’s attempts at change through political development at the turn
of the 50s, i.e., constitutional changes, involved efforts to stem the tide of feared chaos
that might undermine empire. It was also directed against any kind of change that they
perceived to be socially transforming. A prime example earlier on was their intent in
establishing a Labor Department for the colonies in the late 1930s, even when the idea
was not readily welcomed among British colonial authorities in the colonies. The
Colonial Office was particularly very anxious about labor and developments in the trade
union movements in the colonies.1130 The intent in creating the Labor Department in
1938 and in giving recognition to trade unions in the colonies was to control colonial
labor, as earlier works on colonial labor have also indicated, and as also indicated earlier
in this study1131 Damachi, Seibel, and Trachtman commented that “what was being
introduced via government support was a kind of ‘guided democracy.’”1132
British officialdom’s notion of change in the late 40s and early 50s, like the
British initiative in introducing the idea of colonial development or the establishment of
labor department for the colonies in the late 30s, involved taking pre-emptive steps and
making state-sponsored changes precisely so as to enable them maintain control and
prevent any radical change, i.e., change from below. It involved attempts to tailor the
course of development in the colonies in the direction of ordered progress. Their idea of
change was also predicated on what would enable the British to maintain influence in
these colonies in the vaguely-defined future possibility of self-government for these
colonies. In her study in which she attempted to deconstruct political development
theories, Gendzier noted that the need to make change and take control of change in the
era of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was aimed at
preventing the “entry of the masses into politics.”1133 British endeavors towards change
in their West African colonies was also predicated on the need to prevent the possible
loss of their colonies to communist control, as happened in the case of French
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Indochina,1134 and which such mass politics or colonial radicals’ intervention in these
colonies evoked in official mind.
A poignant example of official engineering to prevent such possibilities was also
revealed earlier on in the way the British, through Edgar Parry, the Labor Adviser in
Sierra Leone, hand-picked Siaka Stevens, perceived to be a more moderate and therefore
amenable trade unionist, to replace Wallace-Johnson whose politics of social change felt
threatening to officials.1135 Denzer’s remark that “the government thus succeeded in
isolating Wallace Johnson from a movement which might have been able to generate a
broad movement for self-government,”1136 was precisely what officials wanted to prevent
by such intervention and through the limits they tried to imposed on Wallace-Johnson
and his activities in the interwar period. Perceived in various undesirable terms as an
“extremist,” “communist,” and “unscrupulous professional agitator,”1137 the colonial
authorities were anxious that he did not gain or retain the initiative in the colonies and
thus take the colonies on the feared and believed path of extremism and communism.
Such examples of state engineering were rife in what turned out to be the last two
decades of British rule in these places. British officialdom would go against popular
movements such as the FRK-led AWU movement in Abeokuta that had resulted in the
forced abdication of the unpopular colonial chief, Alake Ademola, and would connive in
his return - a return more or less to the status quo. The AWU movement was by this time
beginning to be included in some of the progressive changes in local authority rule, tied
to the overall changes that were beginning to be made in the Indirect Rule system. FRK
had gained access into one of the governing institutions in Egbaland but unlike the
Azikiwes and the Nkrumahs, she continued on the path of seeking for grassroot changes,
and therefore of potential confrontation with colonial authorities. The space for her kind
of social intervention was being made difficult partly by continued official maneuvers in
local authority rule in Abeokuta provinces as elsewhere and through the constitutional
changes. The Abeokuta case exemplifies the way in which officials were seeking to
engineer the changes being introduced in the colonies along officially desired “ordered”
paths.
In Abeokuta, the abdication of the Alake in 1948 and the changes made to the
Sole Native Authority (SNA) system promised developments along more democratic
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lines. Part of the changes involved the incorporation for the first time of a handful of
women in the administration, along with the Ogbonis who were also represented in the
newly constituted Egba Central Council (ECC). But victory would not be so readily won
or sustained for the women organized in the AWU and the gains were limited. The
women in the AWU might have won the battle at the stage of the Alake’s abdication and
in the setting up of what promised to be a more responsive reconstituted institution, the
ECC, into which a few women had gained access, but they had not won the war. Even
the taxes against which they had also demonstrated that were abolished subsequently
were revived later. The colonial authorities’ connivance in reinstating the Alake within a
couple of years and their continued support of him irrespective of his shortcomings and
failures served as much in the end to limit the democratic potentials of the changes being
effected at this time. It also served to further undermine more progressive forces and
agendas, including women’s effective representation in the structures of power.
In spite of the Alake’s gross abuses and mismanagement, British officials
continued to favor him. By comparison, they disparaged FRK and the grassroot-oriented
AWU movement she led and constantly singled her out for denunciation, as well as
placed several bans on her freedom of movement.1138 The Alake, on the other hand, was
venerated and praised, in spite of his widespread abuses and the intense popular
disenchantment against him.1139 Representations made against the Alake by many
important organized bodies and interest groups in Egbaland had also been made up to the
seat of government in Britain - to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, and to the
British Parliament.1140 Before he was exiled and after his return, colonial officials would
use the occasion of official speeches and utterances in the Legislative Council, in the
Egba Central Council (EEC), and in the press, etc., to show their fervent patronage of
Alake Ademola, regardless of his alleged misrule and opposition to him, or perhaps
because of the grassroot opposition to him! Earlier, in a prepared statement before the
Council on February 27, 1948, the Resident in Abeokuta had declared support for its
decision to ban Kuti from the palace, stating that he regretted the “insulting of the Alake”
and other activities of “certain persons who had disturbed the peace and tranquility of
Abeokuta.”1141 Grassroot opposition movements were constantly derided and reduced to
the activities of a “misguided and mischievous few.” Thanking the Alake and regretting
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recent demonstrations and “defiance of authority which had occurred in Abeokuta,”
Hoskyns-Abrahall, the Chief Commissioner for Western Provinces, declared in his
address in Council Hall, Abeokuta on 27 April, 1948 in regard to the AWU’s agitational
movement that “all true sons of Abeokuta must feel with him this sorrow at the
misguided and mischievous activities of some of her children.”1142
After the exiling of the Alake in 1948, the democratic process was not allowed to
work itself out and the Alake was returned within a short time to head the reconstituted
ECC. Reading through the various documents relating to the process by which the Alake
was returned to office, it is clear that his return was stage-managed by the
administration.1143 In the interim, colonial officials had promised free and fair election of
a new Alake while also promising that the decision regarding the return of the previous
one would be determined by popular vote. This would not be adhered to, however, as
colonial officials would manipulate the process differently. Votes taken in the Council
periodically from then on till November 1950 to decide on this issue indicated a lack of
considerable support for the return of the Alake, Oba Ademola. But colonial officials
continued to stall on the issue of the election of a new Alake and on the action to take
resulting from the votes against the return of the old Alake till November, 1950.
According to the protest letter from FRK to the SOS, James Griffith, and enclosed in
papers sent to him,1144 attempts by Egba Alake Chiefs and people to have the Native
Authority Council grant permission to install a new Alake was not supported by the
Council. According to her, each time they submitted their notification to the Council,
they would be told that no consideration would be given to the appointment of a new
Alake or discussion held on the return of the old one till the Constitution for Egbaland
had been completed. She went on to protest that the same administration had always
shown favor to pro-Alake supporters in different motions before the Council for the
return of the ex-Alake.1145
Having failed to respond to what seemed to be the popular wish, the colonial
authority in the person of the District Officer, J. D. Hamilton, used the occasion of the
ECC meeting of November 30, 1950 which had ended in disarray over the issue of the
return of the Alake to send out a release suggesting that the only way to settle the
question was to appoint a Peace Commission. No such committee was, however, set up
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and no investigation or commission of enquiry was made before Ademola was returned
to Abeokuta secretly without the knowledge of the people of Abeokuta. This was after an
official meeting held at night in Ibadan on 3rd December, 1950 at which were present the
Chief Commissioner, Western Provinces, the Resident, and the D. O., Abeokuta, along
with the ex-Alake Ademola. The administrator, in his letter to the Secretary of State on
8th December, 1950 justified the return of the Alake on the basis of the ECC votes of 30th
November, 1950 regardless of the fact that the number of votes in favor of his return out
of a possible 95 did not validate a resolution.1146 This vote meant a reversal of the
decision of the same body, the ECC, only a month previously which stated that a
resolution could only be carried by a majority of the Council. The administrator,
nevertheless, went on to report that “as a result the Alake, having called on the Chief
Commissioner in Ibadan, returned to Abeokuta early yesterday morning, 3rd
December.”1147 It glossed over the fact that the Alake did not just “call” on the Chief
Commissioner but attended a more or less pre-arranged secret official meeting in Ibadan
to plan for his surreptitious return to Abeokuta.
The AWU under its ardent spokeswoman, FRK, and the anti-Alake Ademola
faction of the Ogboni fraternity opposed the way and manner in which the Alake was
returned and what was perceived to be official complicity in the return of the ex-Alake.
In the protest letter signed by FRK on behalf of the AWU, she objected to such
undemocratic official procedures. Her remarks on the secret meeting and its composition
is commentary on some of the ways officials went about managing change: “These
people discussed and sealed a whole nation’s fate without consulting the affected
people,” she lamented.1148
The nature of official involvement to produce the kind of result that occurred in
this case was characteristic of the way in which officialdom dealt with popular protest
movements and how they attempted to engineer the process of change in these places
along officially desired ends. It was to repeat itself in this and other forms throughout the
remaining period of their rule and was not uncharacteristic of how they had dealt with
such challenges in the past. Where they retained or re-installed unpopular rulers such as
revealed in the case of the Alake, they hoped at best that by a process of self reformation,
etc., such rulers would transform themselves to become more responsive to the
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people.1149 By that reasoning, it would not involve the much needed changes or
transformation of the structures of authority at that level without which good intentions
could not be readily translated into good government.
Ordered Progress – 1948-1953
Even though the hands of officials were being forced in the turns and twists of events to
embark on constitutional changes, or perhaps because of it, in what became the last years
of colonial rule in British West Africa, officials were resolved to guide the changes along
officially desired ways, i.e., what they termed ordered progress. In addressing the
proposed amendments to the Gold Coast constitution which had just come into existence
barely a year before then and in response to the wishes of Nkrumah and the CPP, the
Secretary of State, Mr. Lyttelton, in February 1952 had defended the amendments in
those terms. The decision to make those amendments was based on the advice given by
Arden-Clarke, the Governor of Gold Coast, and with which he was in agreement.1150 He
said Arden-Clarke had advised that if they did not make those concessions, he did not
think he could hold back demands for self-government and Dominion status now,
referring to the platform of “self-government now” on which Nkrumah and the CPP had
won the landslide victory in the 1951 Gold Coast election. He continued, in reference to
the advice given to him by Arden-Clarke, that if they refused, “substantial numbers of
troops would be required to keep the country quiet.”1151 Lyttelton then went on to report
in his Cabinet memo that, “if, on the other hand, [we[ make concessions, there is at least
a chance of a policy of ordered progress.”1152
It was important to take and retain the initiative for ordered progress. Reflecting
on the1948 crisis, Mr. Lyttelton regretted that:
It was the Government’s failure properly to assess the
strength of nationalist aspirations, and to retain the
confidence of the people and the initiative for ordered
constitutional advance, that was the root cause of the riots
and bloodshed of February/March, 1948.1153
Officialdom believed that such disorders like those of 1948 in the Gold Coast
could be avoided for the future by taking proper charge of affairs thereafter and steering
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the course of change along ordered lines. Ordered progress in official parlance also
involved allowing the kind of changes that facilitated the acquisition of power by, or gave
responsibility to those Africans that officials liked or preferred - the “moderates”- and
marginalized those they did not like - the “extremists.” Officialdom’s notion of ordered
progress meant managing change, involving an exercise by the state of its power to
decide how colonials would be represented and by which type of colonials. By
attempting, for example, to control who gets to participate in constitutional review
committees or enter into the new legislatures and by attempting to structure the agendas
for change, officialdom embarked on the process of managing change.
Following the Watson Committee’s recommendations for constitutional changes
in the Gold Coast, the “wise men” that officials chose to represent the people of the Gold
Coast in the all African Coussey Constitutional Review Committee that was set up
subsequently in the Gold Coast were hand-picked, men that officials perceived to be
“responsible” and “moderate.” But they could not be said to be representative of
colonials across the board. It was stacked with UGCC leaders and chiefs. These had
gone out of their way to prove their loyalty to the colonial power after the 1948 Gold
Coast crisis, and even more so after the January 1950 General Strike and Positive
Action.1154
Nkrumah and the CPP were blamed by both the chiefs and the UGCC for the
crises of January 1950. To the UGCC members who had dominated the Coussey
Constitutional Committee, the crisis of 1950 appeared as a direct challenge to their
potential access to state power, commented Engwenyu.1155 The chiefs were also rebuked
by the UGCC and blamed, indirectly, for the January 1950 situation.1156 In the UGCC’s
“Open Letter to Nnanom in Council,” the chiefs were indicted and told that the reckless
declaration of the Positive Action by the CPP had unfortunately “given opportunity for
reactionary forces in the country to strengthen their position not only against the
revolutionary and radical elements but even to question some of the plans of the
progressive and saner groups.”1157 The younger and Western-educated and non-chiefly
elements in the UGCC were the self-described “progressive and saner groups,”
attempting to distinguish themselves from the chiefs, on the one hand, and Nkrumah and
the social radicals, on the other hand. They sought to put themselves at a vantage
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position vis-à-vis both the “revolutionary and radical elements,” as Nkrumah and the CPP
were being conceived at this time, and the “reactionary forces,” in reference to the chiefs,
for the acquisition of political power at this time.
The “revolutionary and radical elements” would indeed agree with the UGCC that
the chiefs were “reactionary forces.” But the voices of the former were silent in the
Coussey Constitutional Committee deliberations. As seen in this significant case in the
Gold Coast, the Committee’s composition left out voices of other constituent forces workers, ex-servicemen, women traders, and ordinary Gold Coast member of society –
all key players who had been at the forefront of the crises and the movement for change
in the Gold Coast colony, i.e., the 1948 and the January 1950 Gold Coast social protest
movements.
Voices from Below
A pitfall of official tendencies to reduce to the level of mere agitators, extremists,
and communists those they did not like was in the way it collapsed into one category a
variety of socially relevant interventions in the colonies – democratic, leftwing-radical,
populist, grassroot, etc. - some of which, given the political space, could have otherwise
enriched the discourse of change and of community and citizenship and produced more
broad-based and enduring constitutions, particularly in what became the Independence
Constitution in these places. The marginalization of these other social forces and
constituencies only served to produce a more narrowly based Independence Constitution,
engendering continued tension and crises before and after independence in these West
African societies.
In the era of constitutional changes that began in the late 40s and continued into
the 50s, certain colonials with contrasting vision of change and of society contested the
perceived limits being put on change. Some of them sought to broaden the potential
democratic base of the new constitutional arrangements. In places where Indirect Rule
through Native Authorities was practiced, for example, the constitutional provisions put
great limitations on the prospects for democratic change. In these places, such as the
Sierra Leone Protectorate and the Northern Provinces of Nigeria, the provision which
259
remained unchanged in the 1951 constitution for indirect election into regional and
central bodies through a system of electoral colleges constrained against popular
representation, as earlier revealed in he case of the NEPU.1158 In Sierra Leone, the 1951
Constitution there provided for the election of only three of the ten unofficial minority
and all the three elected came from the Colony only.1159 The remaining representatives
from the Protectorate were elected through electoral colleges consisting of Paramount
Chiefs who elected their favorites. Such provisions served to remove capacity from more
grassroot-oriented political organizations and parties such as the Kono Progressive
Movement (KPM) in the diamond mining area of Kono in the Sierra Leone Protectorate.
On the other hand, it gave capacity to the more elitist and rather conservative political
organizations or parties in these places such as the Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) in
the Sierra Leone Protectorate and the NPC in the North of Nigeria, and to the
conservative elites who largely composed their leadership.
In Sierra Leone, the Freetown-based Sierra Leone Progressive Independence
Movement (SLPIM) demanded equal justice for all citizens, an end to oppression of the
young by the chiefs and court presidents, respect for the rights of indigenous population
by the government and foreign commercial interests, etc. Their demands were partly
expressed in a later issue of Kono Mannda paper, which became the Kono journal of the
SLPIM. The December 1, 1958 copy which was dedicated to explaining Kono problems
to a visiting delegation of British Parliamentarians, stated thus:
Many of the chiefs in the mining areas have completely lost
their originality since their contact with the capitalist
monopolies. The company’s goodwill mission in Kono has
been in the form of old Land Rovers, cases of whisky and
65,000 (British pounds sterling) which was loosely thrown
into their pockets last year in order to … suppress other
Africans so that their freedom of movement, speech and
assembly can be banned. Behaving like capitalist robots,
the chiefs in collusion with the government and the
company have conspired to make inhuman legislations to
make an iron-curtain around Kono to safeguard the
demands of monopolies.1160
Also, the Kono Progressive Movement (KPM) established in the diamond mining town
of Kono, having failed to influence the SLPP mainstream political party in government to
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reallocate resources as deemed more equitably, sought to control the apparatus of
national government themselves by organizing from without. Hence they merged with
the SLPIM in 1958 to “prosecute more vigorously a political campaign for national unity
and independence.”1161 They also organized protest through riots and civil disobedience.
In Northern Nigeria, the NEPU, a grassroot-oriented political movement which
was addressing issues of social concerns and of citizens’ rights in the Native Authority
Emirates there, was looked upon with disfavor by the emirs in the Native Authority
system as well as by the British, as earlier indicated.1162 British officials had preferred to
leave the status quo in the North largely in place and to have unpolluted “the Hausa and
Fulani of the North, Muslims and warriors, with the dignity, courtly manners, high
bearing and conservative outlook which democracy and the Daily Mirror have not yet
debased,”1163 in the words of the Secretary of State, Mr. Lyttelton. The British and the
Native Authorities chiefs – the emirs - sought to constrain the ability of NEPU to become
a formidable force in the North of Nigeria partly through constitutional means.
The NEPU which was gaining ground and popular support from the onset of the
movement was rather perceived in dysfunctional terms by the British colonial authorities
who chose to deride it as an “extremist group” and to cast aspersions on it as a
“dangerous political force in the Northern Provinces.”1164 “This organization,” the
Political Intelligence Summary of October 1951 warned,
Continues as the most active and dangerous political force
in the Northern Provinces. Active in setting itself up as the
protector of the poor and politically down-trodden,
dangerous in that it is a minority movement whose
expressed aims conflict with the existing system of Native
Administration.1165
However, they could not ignore the fact that “their zeal and organizing ability
have already succeeded in winning them a commanding position in a number of Urban
Intermediate Electoral Colleges.”1166 NEPU’s drive against corruption and other ills of
the Native Authority System in the North was beginning to draw popular support and
response and colonial officials, no longer able to ignore NEPU’s growing and substantial
strength, were anxious to arrest its growing importance. The British had expected the
NPC, the party of the ruling elite which they favored, to wipe out NEPU as a player on
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the Northern political scene. The Political Intelligence Summary of June, 1951 had
expressed that, “As regards the future, it cannot be denied that NEPU has begun to make
a substantial progress,” and warned that “unless … the N.P.C. pulls itself together and
evolves a positive political programme, NEPU will become all powerful.”1167 Colonial
authorities were anxious that NEPU did not become all powerful!
It was such kind of social intervention as the NEPU’s that might have shaped out
a different terrain, perhaps a more democratic society, for future independent West
African nations that colonial officials actively prevented from taking root in these
colonies. Fearful of the potentials and rise of NEPU, British colonial authorities sought
to arrest its continued rise. The provisions in the 1951 Constitution in the North of
Nigeria helped to take care of that. A special technique that was built into the electoral
regulations in early elections there in the 1951 Constitution gave undue advantage to the
ruling elite in the Native Authority System in the way it was manipulated and served to
constrain against NEPU’s ability to participate in national politics on its own terms.1168
This is a telling commentary on the circumscribed nature of the democratic openings in
the new constitutions and the prospects for building community in more inclusive terms.
However, officialdom’s attempt to close off certain discourses and to exclude
certain colonials from popular participation in the political process, including the limits
being set in the new constitutional provisions, continued to be contested by various
colonial forces, including the social radicals. Wallace-Johnson of Sierra Leone, NEPU
radicals, Funlayo Ransome Kuti, Hajiyya Sawaba, Mallam Ringim, the Zikist left in
Nigeria, and labor socialist-oriented Pobee Biney and Anthony Woode in the Gold Coast,
for example, remained critical of the shortcomings of the constitutional provisions of the
50s and of what was becoming mainstream politics and discourse of the “nation” in their
colonies.1169 They sought to continue to privilege the discourse of the “nation” and of
citizenship in more inclusive terms in contrast to what was being legitimized in the ongoing constitutional changes.
Some of them gave voice, for example, to the removal of constraints on the
development of nation-wide political party inherent in the new federalist (bicameral)
constitutions being enacted in Nigeria and the Sierra Leone. They advocated a unitary
constitution that they believed would facilitate the growth of National Societies. Such a
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provision that also enabled the development of a national political party was deemed to
facilitate popular participation and representation at the grassroot level. It could be said,
however, that the federalist provisions in the 1951 Nigerian and Sierra Leone
Constitutions which became legitimized in subsequent constitutions was officialdom’s
attempt to deal with the challenge of multi-national composition of these two colonies.
In the Gold Coast that was less pluralistic, officialdom did institute a unitary constitution.
Ironically, in the latter case, the opposition to the CPP – the UGCC and the NLM wanted a federalist constitution that would enable them to better share power at the
central level.
Wallace-Johnson raised serious objections in the Sierra Leone Legislature to what
he regarded as the shortcomings of the new constitutional arrangements there and the
ways the Constitutions were being patterned.1170 In connection with these concerns,1171
Wallace Johnson made a trip to Britain in 1952 as a member of Sierra Leone Legislative
Council and as Organizing Secretary of the West African Civil Liberties National
Defense League to discuss with the Colonial Office the perceived most glaring anomalies
of the constitution and of political developments in Sierra Leone since the election in
November, 1951. At the meeting in London of April 9, 1952, he issued a statement
calling for direct voting throughout the colony and the Protectorate.1172 WallaceJohnson’s objections to the 1951 Sierra Leone Constitution included what he regarded as
its anomalous and inequitable features and provisions. He criticized the fact that a
quarter million people of the Colony had seven representatives while one and a half
million people of the Protectorate had only 14 representatives and that elections to the
Council were only representative and democratic in the Colony while Protectorate
representatives were elected through electoral colleges consisting of Paramount Chiefs
who were stipendiary and dependent on government approval.1173 Because the
Protectorate could not elect its representatives democratically, no party with a program
for the whole country could get represented in the Protectorate, he further expressed.1174
As such, he concluded, the 1951 Constitution divides Colony from Protectorate and
prevents the growth of national parties representing nationwide interests.1175 He further
pointed to the undemocratic structure of the Executive Council where the Governor alone
may select and nominate not less than four of the unofficial members who, with the seven
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ex-officio members (government officials) would form the Executive with the Governor
as president. Thus, he said, the policy-making machinery remained in the Governor’s
hands and that even if a political party were to obtain a majority in spite of the
undemocratic electoral system, it would not control the administration of the
government.1176
Wallace-Johnson was also critical of the government, in particular the newlyelected African Ministers for Local Government, Education and Welfare, Mr. A. Milton
Margai, and the Minister for Lands, Mines and Labour, Mr. Siaka P. Stevens,1177 who he
said were mere armchair ministers.1178 Wallace-Johnson was critical of his perceived
lack of concern for, and discussion of issues in the legislature that affected a wide crosssection of the Sierra Leone people especially by these African ethnopolitical
entrepreneurs who were now in the colonies’ Legislative and Executive Councils and had
been elected to represent the people. Unlike them, Wallace-Johnson tried to use his
presence in the Legislative Council to advocate for the grassroot and to privilege a
discourse of democratic and grassroot change.
Wallace-Johnson engaged the members of the Sierra Leone Legislature with the
problems of colonial economic development and the rights of disadvantaged segments of
that society. He critiqued the way colonial capital had shaped African economies and
societies and voiced concern about the pattern of unequal exchange that would continue
to subordinate African economies to those of industrialized West. Wallace-Johnson’s
anti-imperialism was also tied to anti-capitalism, in the Marxist tradition. But, unlike the
Marxist tradition, he was not opposed to the idea of economic development in Western
terms as an engine of progress. Stressing the need to establish industries in Sierra Leone,
he regretted that “the government had been in power for five years without thinking of
introducing any form of industry.”1179 He stated that a mechanized or industrialized
agricultural base would prevent the drift of the mass of the youths to the mining areas by
providing them with gainful employment in the countryside. Instead of spending so
much money on the building of new police buildings as budgeted in the current year
estimate, money should rather be invested in social development schemes and in the
development of education, he stressed. He believed that changing the emphasis on these
would arrest the trend towards social unrest in the Colony and Protectorate of Sierra
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Leone as recently witnessed in the Northern Provinces tax riots.1180 He believed that it
would also help to curb the high incidence of stealing among young boys who came from
the Protectorate to the Freetown Colony with no educational credentials whatsoever and
who swelled the ranks of the unemployed in the cities. These young boys also swelled
the ranks of prison inmates in Freetown as well. He said:
This money that we are now spending to build police
station, to establish police state in this country, would have
been better spent if we had built schools and technical
institutions everywhere to have youths of the country
trained so as to keep them away from crimes, but we have
not done that.1181
Wallace-Johnson was similarly concerned about producer prices for farmers of Sierra
Leone’s exported items such as palm kernels, kolanuts, ginger, palm-oil, groundnuts,
bennissed, cocoa, and coffee. He expressed concern about the operation of the Marketing
Board as another source of government’s expropriation of the wealth produced by
producers and advocated direct control of the Marketing Boards by producers
themselves.1182
The NEPU in Nigeria also decried the many perceived shortcomings of the new
constitutions in Nigeria and the manner in which they were being established. It opposed
the “strict” Federal System as entirely unsuitable to the circumstances of Nigeria and
proposed instead a “quasi-Federal System as practiced in Canada until a Constituent
Assembly considers a Constitution for the country on attaining independence.”1183 The
NEPU emphasized that the decision regarding what form of government was best for
Nigeria be made through popular consultation. It emphasized that:
The debate on Federal, Quasi-Federal or Unitary
Constitution for Nigeria must be carried into every village
and the pros and cons explained to the people. The NEPU
will not support the attempt of the Regional Governments
and the Colonial Office to make the division of Nigeria a
fait accompli by granting self government to the Regions
before the people of Nigeria know what is actually
happening.1184
NEPU was concerned about the perceived unrepresentative ways in which the
constitutional review process and constitutional changes were being effected in Nigeria in
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the 50s. It regarded the 1956 Conference as critical because it was the last of its kind
before Nigeria’s independence which had already been agreed to by officialdom and the
political incumbents – the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs. NEPU believed that the 1956
Conference should lay a more solid foundation upon which a permanent Nigerian
constitution would be established by the Constituent Assembly which would follow the
British withdrawal from the country. NEPU therefore drew attention to the weaknesses
in the previous constitutions on which the final Constitution was being built and
suggested ways to amend them.
NEPU was very emphatic on the need for full participation of all citizens in the
making of the new constitutions. It expressed its belief that any formal conference with
the Colonial Office by the political leaders must be preceded by conferences at the
divisional, provincial and regional levels as it believed was done in 1949/50.1185
Critiquing the 1953/54 London and Lagos Constitutional Conferences, its position paper
stated that:
The London and Lagos Conferences of 1953/4 did not
reflect the views of the people of Nigeria as the conferences
were organized by the Colonial Office to effect changes in
the 1950 Constitution without consulting the people of
Nigeria.1186
The NEPU was very insistent on the principle of consultation and representativeness. It
went on to express that:
The NEPU does not believe that the changes which altered
the whole basis of the 1950 Constitution without previously
consulting the people, can be valid and permanent. The
Party wants an opportunity to be given to the people to
have their say before those alterations are further
entrenched in the political life of Nigeria.1187
NEPU had also, right from the beginning of the process of constitutional reviews
in the late 40s and even while still within the Northern Peoples’ Congress (NPC) parent
cultural organization from which it broke away, raised opposition to the principle of
nomination, in view of the inherent potentials for abuse. In such a political culture and
context, the NEPU ended up not having any of its members represented in any of the
Northern Nigerian governing councils, i.e., the Emir's Council, the Provincial
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Committees, or the Northern House of Assembly. In a memorandum to the Kano Native
Authority, copies of which were reported to have been forwarded to the District Officer
and the Superintendent of Police, NEPU sought for recognition and active participation in
the overall problems of Northern Nigeria in particular and of Nigeria in general.1188
When asked by the press on how the NEPU would participate in the political activities of
the North as their members were neither represented in the Emir's Council or in the
Northern House of Assembly, an official of NEPU being questioned replied that was the
challenge which they (NEPU) must accept. Emphasizing NEPU’s concern for
democratic change, the NEPU official reiterated that:
This age … is that of the common man and nobody can
claim to speak for the North now without full consultation
with the masses of which we form a reasonable part.1189
In spite of this and other challenges it faced, NEPU would continue to agitate for reform
and democratization of the Native Authority System in the North as prelude to selfgovernment, partly through alliances with other political parties.
Concessions to the Moderates
The process of constitutional change embarked upon from the late 40s and beginning of
the 50s would take on a life of its own, compound the crises in colonial society, and set
into motion demands for more changes. Officialdom’s efforts to introduce changes and
to democratize the structure of government in some guided ways through new
constitutions generated more discontent and increased the crises in local African society,
intensifying competition and struggles among Africans.1190 It also increased demands for
radical changes, including the demand for immediate self-government among some
colonials. Officialdom’s response to the crisis of change in colonial African society was
always a little too late and generated more discontent. Changes made at any one time led
to clamoring for more changes and for greater openings and democratization of the
structures of government and of society.
In the Gold Coast, the new constitution had hardly been introduced in 1950 before
it was subject to further review and changes leading to a new constitution in 1952. This
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in turn was quickly subject to review and was superseded by a new one in 1956 which
became the Gold Coast Independence Constitution. In Nigeria, the 1951 Constitution had
barely been introduced before that also quickly became subject to stresses and strains and
lasted only twenty seven months.1191 A new constitution was granted there every three
years till the grant of the Independence Constitution in 1960. These quick reviews and
grant of new constitutions in these places was in spite of the Colonial Office’s aversion to
frequent constitutional changes. The new Secretary of State, Mr. J. Griffiths, had earlier
in July 1950 advised the Governor of Nigeria against too frequent constitutional changes,
stating that “if changes are made too often they are bound to have an unsettling effect on
the political and economic life of a country.”1192
However, the continued crises in the colonies and the perceived socially radical
demands of the “extremists,” including their insistence on the grant of immediate selfgovernment for the colonies, made officialdom more conciliatory to the demands of those
who by comparison were seen by them as moderates and gradualists at this time and as
able to work with them in maintaining empire. The moderates were perceived to be
seeking for political change - not social change or immediate self-government - and
through constitutional means, willing to work within officially-set boundaries.
Officials had come to accept in principle the need to grant concessions to these
“moderates” and as means of marginalizing the “extremists” and had started to make
tactical shifts towards them, consequent to the 1948 Gold Coast crisis and the Watson
Committee’s and Coussey Committee’s reports that followed it. In October, 1949 the
Secretary of State, Creech-Jones, in outlining the recommendations of the Coussey
Committee’s report and of the Colonial Office’s intended response to it, wrote in a
Cabinet memo, and I quote at length:
During the past eighteen months there has been
considerable political agitation in the Gold Coast and the
extremists have been conducting a campaign for immediate
responsible government, which has attracted support
among the less responsible elements. There is, however, a
large body of moderate opinion which, while recognizing
that the country is not yet ready for full responsible
government, is convinced, as the Governor and myself are,
that immediate constitutional advance is necessary. I think
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that it is important that the Governor should be placed in a
position to rally behind him this moderate opinion.1193
Referring to the need to accept the Coussey Committee’s report, subject to certain
reservations, the SOS went on to say that:
If we accept the report broadly … the Governor hopes to
have moderate opinion behind him, although the extremists
will not of course be satisfied. If we are not prepared to
accept it broadly, moderate opinion will be alienated and
the extremists given an opportunity of gaining further and
weightier support and of making serious trouble.1194
Creech-Jones regarded the Coussey Committee’s report as “a victory for moderate
opinion.”1195 Officialdom was ready to meet the “moderates” halfway, even if this meant
moving a little faster in the Gold Coast than their preferred pace of change.
The “moderates” in the Gold Coast were the UGCC intelligentsia and chiefs that
had also largely composed the membership of the Coussey Commission, for example.
Danquah, in what could be said to be his ambivalent role in the 1948 Gold Coast riots,
had used it to push UGCC’s agenda for political advance as he simultaneously used it as
a plea for constitutional gradualism. In fact, he was close to officialdom’s heartbeat
when he reiterated that “complete self-government or independence was not the policy of
the Convention.”1196 As of 1949, Nkrumah was still regarded as one of those extremists
but he would enter into the ranks of the “moderates” as he gained political power and
began to work cooperatively with the colonial authorities.1197 As Kwame Nkrumah
would later in his autobiography rationalize in regard to his own tactical shift of position
to accept office in 1951 as CPP’s Leader of Government Business in the Gold Coast
Legislature and to work with the status quo:
It was felt that had [we] not accepted office by virtue of our
majority in the Assembly, but had embarked on noncooperation and remained in the Opposition, we would
merely have been pursuing a negative course of action …
Government positions could also help us to obtain the
initiative in the continuing struggle for full selfgovernment.1198
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Nkrumah was right, in that he had more correctly reasoned, in the light of what he had
assessed was possible, that there were certain gains to be derived from working with the
colonial authorities and seeking concessions and change from within the power structure.
Nkrumah and the “moderates” could be said to be realist, politicians eager to win; they
considered their agenda was indeed better served by cooperation with the colonial power.
The interests of both were coinciding well. Colonial officials were willing to institute
reforms involving certain degree of political decentralization in the colonies and were
eager to work with willing Africans in ways they perceived would ensure the success of
this. African politicians – the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs - were also seeking for
political decentralization - and political power – but as opposed, for example, to social
change and grassroot empowerment and/or the grant of immediate self-government that
some of the social radicals were seeking for and which officialdom was unwilling to
effect, and in fact anxious to arrest at this time, as seen in the case of NEPU. And the
more the radicals pushed, i.e., for immediate self-government and grassroot changes, etc.,
the more the African politicians, the “moderates,” stood to gain, by default, from
officialdom’s fear of the radicals and “extremists.” It led officialdom to seek to empower
the “moderates” over the radicals by granting more concessions to the “moderates”! In
order to forestall the challenge from the “extremists,” officials would meet more of the
demands of the “moderates” for political change and for the quickening of the pace of
constitutional change. By so doing, the “moderates” were, unwittingly, gaining more
political grounds and power!
In mid-1951, the Colonial Office, anxious to retain the goodwill of Nkrumah and
the CPP party moderates in the colony’s governing Councils, indicated a willingness to
accommodate his and the demands of the rest of the CPP leadership in government for
certain more changes. In discussing the next stage of political development in the Gold
Coast during May and early June, 1951 in preparation for the meeting between the
Secretary of State, Mr. Griffiths, and Nkrumah, the Governor, Arden-Clarke, had
indicated to Mr. Griffiths his government’s preparedness to accept two principal request
of Nkrumah.1199 Nkrumah wanted the title of Leader of Government Opposition to be
changed to that of Prime Minister and to also be able to get ministers elected on his
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advice as the Prime Minister and not at the Governor’s discretion.1200 Defending the
need to make these concessions to Nkrumah, Arden-Clarke advised the Colonial Office
that there was no alternative to a CPP government and that it could only be replaced by a
similar one or one of “even more extreme nationalist tendencies.”1201 He wrote to Cohen
in regard to his policy of appeasement towards Nkrumah that: “We have only one dog in
our kernel. All we can do is to build it up and feed it vitamins and cod-liver oil .”!1202 In
building up the “dog” and feeding it with “vitamins and cod-liver oil,” however, the
“dog” was also waxing strong in the embrace of its breeder and discreetly gaining one
concession after another till he got the prize that he had set his eyes on – the Prime
Ministership of a full self-governing Gold Coast in 1956!
An otherwise reluctant advocate of rapid constitutional change in the Colonial
Office, A. B. Cohen, would also indicate a certain willingness to be responsive to the
demands of Nkrumah and the “moderates” for more constitutional changes. This is
because of the fear of the perceived alternative, i.e., of the “extremists” gaining the
upperhand. Cohen, who was one of the three main British policy-makers present at the
second meeting of Nkrumah with the Secretary of State, Griffiths, in the Colonial Office
on 13th June, 1951, had indicated a reluctance on moving too quickly on the pace of
constitutional change in the Gold Coast as Nkrumah would have desired.1203 This,
according to Cohen, was in order to “develop administrative and political efficiency so
that the country continues to be well governed.”1204 However, he also indicated his
recognition of the need to be flexible in terms of setting time-tables and in granting
concessions to the moderates in order, according to him, to continue to keep on good
terms with the Gold Coast political leaders. “It must of course, be recognized,” said
Cohen, “that we may not be able to adhere to an ideal time-table,”1205 and went on:
We may be forced, if we are to keep on goods terms with
the more responsible political leaders such as Mr. Nkrumah
and his immediate colleagues and not to force the Gold
Coast Government into the hands of extremists, to move
more rapidly than ideally we should wish.1206
The Extremists and Communism
The radicals’ demands for immediate self-government and their attempts to force
the pace and direction of change only served to continue to cause British officials more
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anxiety, especially in the Cold War context and as this radicalism was being perceived to
be closely tied to the radicalism of the international left and to labor activism. In the
international arena, the so-called rift in the international labor movement in 1949 had
tended to accentuate anxieties of various colonial administrations over possible
“communist infiltration” of labor movement and of nascent political parties in their
colonies. By December 1949, ideological squabbles within the newly formed World
Federation of Trade Union (WFTU) had led to the breakaway of western countries and to
the formation of the rival International Confederation of Free Trade Union (ICFTU). The
WFTU became another identified source of communist influence among Africans abroad
and of communist infiltration into the colonies. The 1949 Official Assessment noted that
before the WFTU moved to Vienna, it “trained at least six of the present Gold Coast's
Communist leaders.”1207 The British had expected that the WFTU would be taking over
the chain of command control from the disbanded Cominform. They were therefore
anxious that unions in the colonies affiliate with the pro-western labor bloc that was
formed later instead of with the WFTU. Their anxiety was even more focused on
breakaway splinter labor groups like the rival Ghana Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU)
formed in 1951 and the Nigerian Labor Congress (NLC) formed in May 1950. The
GFTU and NLC were reported to have been sponsored and dominated by the leftwing of
labor. The NLC was formed in Nigeria in May 1950 from the merger of the NNFL
(which already revealed its preference for the WFTU), the rump of the Nigerian Trade
Union Congress (NTUC), and the independent Government Workers’ Union. In Nigeria,
the division in the labor movement which led to the creation of the leftwing-oriented
labor-led Nigerian National Federation of Labor (NNFL) had also coincided with the rift
in the erstwhile unified international labor movement. The NNFL was closely allied to
an accretion of militants and intellectuals: the left Zikists who espoused socialism, nonZikist Marxian socialists, etc. Officialdom’s fear of a communist-controlled Nigerian
labor movement was made real when the Nigerian Labor Congress (NLC) announced on
the 25th May, 1950 its affiliation with the WFTU.1208
The colonial government was rightly worried about these developments in the
labor movements and with the perceived heightened revolutionary fervor in Nigeria and
in the Gold Coast, including riotings in their other colonies. In Sierra Leone, the Cox
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Commission that was chosen to look into the wave of disturbances there, i.e., in the North
of Sierra Leone in 1955, assessed the situation there as one “better described as civil war
than as a disturbance.”1209 In Nigeria, other developments such as the Enugu colliery
uprising and shootings in November 1949 in Eastern Provinces of Nigeria, the attempted
assassination of the Chief Secretary to the Nigerian government, Sir Hugh Foot, in
February 18, 1950 by a 24-year old Zikist, a 2s.8d a day laborer, Chukuwonka Ugokwu,
and the creation in 1951 of the leftwing-oriented political movement, Freedom
Movement, led by ex-Zikists who had renounced Zikism for the more specific ideology of
revolutionary socialism1210 alarmed colonial officials. The government feared strong
Zikist influence in the colliery uprising and other disturbances in the Eastern Provinces of
Nigeria which followed the shooting at the Enugu colliery, as well as in the February
1950 assassination attempt. In a memo to Sir T. Lloyd from one “L.E” before the Zikist
movement was banned, it was stated, in regard to the Zikists, that, “there seems little
doubt that there is a terrorist core in the Zikist Movement, and the attack on Foot shows
that it is not altogether theoretical.”1211 In reaction to the assassination attempt,
government agents were sent to search homes of Zikists in several towns & villages and
seditious literature were said to have been discovered along with plans for revolutionary
action.1212 The government also indicated that there was a planned revolutionary triple
alliance of the Zikist Movement, the NNFL, and the Amalgamated Union of UAC
African Workers (popularly known as UNAMAG). The evidence was said to be based
on seized documents produced at the 1950 trial of Francis Ikenna Nzimiro, the secretary
of the Onitsha branch of the Zikist Movement and an official of the UNAMAG.1213
The Freedom Movement (FM) could be said to have been the closest to a leftwing
political organization or movement in Nigeria in this period, seemingly attesting to
official fear of communism in the colonies. But all of these organizations did not gain
traction and lost steam within a few years of their founding. The FM joined with a
Marxian study group, the People’s Committee for Independence (PCI), to form a
“League” to advise the UNAMAG and with intent to direct the “socialist” movement in
Nigeria.1214 Its members included known radicals in the annals of Nigeria’s immediate
pre-independence history: S.G. Ikoku, Ayo Ogunsheye, Francis Nzimiro, J. Ola Opara,
Nduka Eze, etc. The FM hoped to establish its base of operations in the trade unions
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under the direction of a new leftwing socialist party. Central to this was also the plan for
a newspaper by the small group of leftwing activists believed to be dependent on
financial support from European communist sources, primarily in Eastern Germany and
Czechoslovakia.1215 The scheme collapsed, however, in February, 1951 when S. G.
Ikoku, the delegate chosen to make arrangement in Europe, was seized at the airport
before his departure.1216 Even more validating of official fear of communism in the
colonies was the fact that Nduka Eze and the radicals in the UNAMAG had also
entertained the idea of forming a Communist Party of Nigeria!1217 But that also never got
off the ground!!
Other like organizations and movements such as the People’s Revolutionary
Committee (PRC) and the National Preparatory Committee (NPR) in Nigeria followed
in the wake of the termination of the NLC/FM initiatives and movements and were
similarly of concern to colonial authorities, but they also lost steam within a short period
of coming into existence.1218 The hard core but nonetheless diminishing leftwingoriented socialists that formed themselves into the PRC went as far as sending a
delegation to the Gold Coast. The PRC was, however, dissolved in September 1951 due
to factional disputes and was succeeded by the National Preparatory Committee (NPR).
The NPR was another attempt to create a radical, leftwing-type political party with interterritorial connections and it adopted the name of the Gold Coast Convention People’s
Party (CPP), i.e., the Convention People’s Party of Nigeria and the Cameroon.1219
Representatives of the Gold Coast CPP visited Nigeria but there were no lasting ties
established. Nkrumah, who was already on the path of accommodation and cooperation
with the British colonial power and its program of constitutional reform, declined to
support the Nigerian CPP movement and the latter also soon became defunct.1220
In the Gold Coast, in the light of their displacement and actual dismissal from
mainstream labor organization by the leadership of the CPP, radical trade unionists
attempted to form their own independent trade union organization or labor party.
Anthony Woode, Pobee Biney, along with Kwesi Lamptey, Abubekr, Yeboah Aukordich,
and B. F. Kusi attempted to form a party named the National Reformation Party (NRP).
The GFTU there was also reported to be sponsored by radical trade unionists like Woode,
Biney, C.A. Duncan, Nana Nketsia, and a number of members of the Unemployment
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Association who were present at its inauguration.1221 In spite of the fact that the colonial
administration in the Gold Coast was gaining the initiative over mainstream labor through
Nkrumah's cooperative efforts, these splinter groups continued to give officials anxiety
about labor radicals. Official reports regarded the new GFTU to be aimed at
undermining the authority of the TUC and of the Ministers and to adopt largely
communist tactics.1222 In an effort to secure their colonies against the influence of the
Soviet Union, the British joined in Anglo-French Ministerial Talks for concerted efforts
and defense against communism in their colonies. They exchanged information on the
state of communism in their colonies as well as strategies to combat its development and
spread.
Officialdom’s Paranoia & more Concessions to the Moderates
The upheavals of the dying years of the 40s and early 50s made officials fearful of
a continuing trend that may get out of control. The crises among labor in British
colonies did not help to assuage official fear but only drove it further. Official paranoia
of communism in the colonies increased in this period as the crises in colonial society
developed and the West rivalry with the Soviet Union intensified. British colonial
officials began to see “red” in every disturbances, in every demonstration, in every move
of colonial radicals, and in every labor upheavals. As the then Deputy President General
of the Zikist Movement in Nigeria, Osita Agwuma, commented in regard to the perceived
British officialdom’s paranoia of communism in the colonies and in what became the
famous “Seditious Lecture” titled, “A Call to Revolution,” in October 1948: “Any
peaceful demonstrations, processions and campaigns in Nigeria today are bound to be
denounced as Communist inspired agitation and demonstrators shot in cold blood.”1223
Every upheaval, union strikes, demonstration, etc., was seen as the work of
“agitators,” “outsiders,” and/or “communist.” In Sierra Leone, the government opposed
the planned demonstration of the SLWM in 1951, accusing them of being communist. It
led Cummings-John, the leader of the movement, to comment that “the British thought
that except for these communistic ideas, the country would be peaceful and the people
satisfied.”1224 The British colonial officials watched the SLWM women demonstrators at
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every instance. When they had a huge prayer meeting which included Moslems and
Christians at Howe street playing field, the government cabled the Colonial Office to
report that “this time the women prayed.”1225 Furthermore, the Sierra Leone Governor,
Dorman, opposed the SLWM’s affiliation with the Women's International Democratic
Federation based in the Soviet Union. He advised them, through Dr. Margai, leader of
the SLPP in Sierra Leone with which the SLWM was in alliance at the time, to join the
International Alliance of Women based in England instead.1226
In the Gold Coast, officials kept a close watch on perceived radical trade unions
and watched every step and move of known radical labor unionists like Anthony Woode
and Pobee Biney of the Gold Coast and a few known others in the other colonies. The
Political Intelligence Reports of March through August 1951 recorded a close watch on
Woode, Biney, and others for their connection with one Cowan from Nigeria and for their
attempts to set up their own alternative labor organization and movement.1227 Cowan was
a Nigerian trade unionist said to be a communist who had arrived in the Gold Coast with
the main objective of trying to arrange for closer cooperation between workers in the four
colonies. The government had then made him a “prohibited immigrant” in its efforts to
remove his possible influence in the other colonies.
Officialdom’s fear of communist influence in these colonies continued to
permeate many of their thinking on future plans as well, even when there was least
justification for this. When the British colonial government was thinking of setting up a
Volta Scheme to produce (aluminum) bauxite for the United States in 1954 as means of
securing additional leverage from Dr. Nkrumah, should it become necessary, they
expressed fear of the possibility of communist Russia sabotaging the project. They
feared that the Soviet Union might interrupt production and sale to Western nations
through “manipulation of the forces of labor in a way which need have no ostensible
connection with Communism at all, provided that indoctrinated and amenable leaders
were infiltrated into key positions.”1228 But there was no hard evidence to justify this
fear.
The fear of Soviet influence and of its infiltration into these West African
colonies remained with British officialdom in varying degrees till the very end. In 1955,
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when the British colonial power was considering the future of British Togoland1229 in an
anticipated future self-governing Gold Coast nation, they had felt reluctant, initially, to
continue to administer it as a Trust Territory once Gold Coast became independent. “The
administration of such a small strip of territory would be difficult once we ceased to have
responsibility for the Gold Coast,” the Cabinet memorandum of 10 November, 1955 on
Togoland had earlier indicated.1230 But the Colonial Office’s fear of the alternative,
should they choose not to continue to administer it, involving the possible opening up of
this territory and thus of this African region subsequently to Soviet influence, led to a
different resolve. They decided to be prepared to accept continuing responsibility for
administering the area should the 400,000 inhabitants of Togoland elect to remain under
Trusteeship in an anticipated plebiscite to be taken at Gold Coast independence.1231 The
Colonial Secretary, expressing the view that they had no alternative but to be prepared to
continue to administer it, should that be the case, stated that:
Among the likely alternatives there were some which
would have dangerous repercussions for us. The United
Nations might, if we refused, elect to administer the
territory directly, and this would at once give the Russians
a voice in Colonial affairs and a vantage point for
interference in Africa.1232
The Colonial Secretary was anxious therefore that in the forthcoming discussions on
British Togoland at the United Nations, Her Majesty’s Government (H.M.G.) take “a
position which would exclude any risk of the territory falling into undesirable hands.”1233
He thereafter undertook to circulate a memorandum to the effect that the Cabinet had
agreed that, in the forthcoming discussion of Togoland at the United Nations, H.M.G.
would state their willingness to accept responsibility for the continued administration of
the territory.1234
Given official continued apprehension of communism in the colonies, it became
even more necessary to concede more to the demands of the “moderates” in government
who were also desirous of having more power devolve to them. Although, in the
aftermath of the 1948 Gold Coast crises, British officialdom had embarked on the path of
constitutional change in the colonies, having accepted the fact that constitutional changes
were inescapable “if the government of the Gold Coast is to continue to be by consent,”
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as they would later rationalize in 1953,1235 they had not been ready, initially, for rapid
change. “It is important not to move too fast,” the Secretary of State, Mr. Griffiths, had
explained British officialdom’s point of view to Nkrumah in his talks with him on June
13th, 1951 during Nkrumah’s visit to the Colonial Office in London.1236 However, they
were also not unaware of the forces that were affecting the process and had recognized
that they might not be able to adhere to an ideal time-table, as Cohen unwittingly forecast
in his June, 1951 minutes.1237 Events later turned out to validate that observation.
Whatever the British colonial power’s timetable was, the dynamic of events had
taken on a life of its own at the turn of the 50s, but still unpredictable which way it would
turn. As late as January 1950, Azikiwe of Nigeria was content with a diarchy for Nigeria,
a constitution that would also safeguard imperial interests, and was still unsure that even
such a constitution would be granted, as earlier noted.1238 Within a decade, however, the
process resulted in ways that went beyond Azikiwe’s more modest expectations of 1950
– the grant of full self-government to Nigeria in 1960. In less than a decade from the
Gold Coast crisis of 1948, the Gold Coast itself attained full self-government in 1956.1239
The fear of the “extremists,” linked to communism, moved the hands of officialdom
along ways and pace previously unintended.
The colonial government had come to accept that it was good policy to be
conciliatory towards the “moderates,” given what they believed to be the alternative. The
United States had already warned the Western colonial powers of the “susceptibility to
Soviet penetration” in regard to these colonies and of the need to be responsive and grant
timely concessions to the “moderates” in their colonies such that would pre-empt the
“leftist elements” among their colonial subjects from gaining control.1240 The U. S. had
further advised the West to “devise formulae that will retain their goodwill as emergent
or independent states.”1241
Although the idea of making concessions to the moderates and the possibility of
internal self-government within the Commonwealth was already beginning to be
entertained as practical policy in the aftermath of the crisis of 1948 in the Gold Coast, the
idea of full self-government, or of self-government within such a short a time was not.
But the “moderates,” beginning to be brought in more and more into government as close
working partners, would also be seeking for the grant of constitutional changes towards
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greater political decentralization as they continued to prove themselves to colonial
officials as able working partners. Both interests were beginning to coincide more
rapidly. Nkrumah, as Leader of Government Business, was proving effective in helping
to tame the Gold Coast labor movement and officials were able to continue to build
confidence in him. With the institutionalization of the CPP as the party in power after its
electoral victory in 1951, the Gold Coast labor movement from which the CPP had
derived important impetus began to be made to conform to official expectations of apolitical unionism.
Nkrumah, who continued on the path of accommodation with the colonial
government especially with his attainment of limited power as Leader of Government
Business in 1951, became instrumental along with members of his CPP in government, in
helping to realize official agenda regarding Gold Coast labor by helping to make it
conform to official expectations in this colony. In 1951, the colonial government had
been worried about Woode and Biney and other labor radicals in the Gold Coast and their
plans to set up an alternative trade union organization and were not sure whether or not
their plans or their ideas would be effected or be successful in “changing the complexion
of the TUC.”1242 They were however satisfied with the assurance from the newly elected
African Minister of Labor, Mr. Gbedemah, that he would prevent them from going ahead
with their plans and he did succeed to this effect.1243 Officials, looking for signs to
further validate such cooperation with their new working partners, analyzed speeches
made at key places, including the Legislative Assembly. For example, in awaiting
Nkrumah's statement at the Budget Session of the Gold Coast Legislative Assembly
which began on February 2, 1954, Maurice Smith of the Colonial Office had written to
Mr. Vile, the Assistant Secretary, that “the reception given to this statement, which taken
with the speech at Achimota may well constitute a fairly open lining up with the
West.”1244
As colonial officials became more assured of the loyalty and ability of their new
working partners, they searched for ways to facilitate the rapprochement with them,
including the grant of more concessions to them. They certainly were not unaware of the
self-interest of their new partners. As Lonsdale remarked, “the first observers to
distinguish the private interest which the ‘class of professional politician’ might possess
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in nationalism from the hopes of the masses were the colonial powers and they were
scarcely disinterested.”1245 The official report of 1956 on anti-communist propaganda in
the Gold Coast, noting the banning of pro-Communist literature by the Gold Coast
government under Nkrumah’s Prime Ministership, had also remarked that:
While the main motive which prompted the Prime
Minister’s action was his determination to curb
Communism, he undoubtedly had his weather eye directed
towards His Majesty’s Government.1246
The report went on to state that it was deemed that by banning communism, Nkrumah
disarmed in advance a potential argument against the grant of independence on basis of
the danger of the Gold Coast joining the Soviet Union after independence.1247 This
comment in itself, coming from officialdom as late as 1956, is validation of the
significance of British officialdom’s fear of communism and of potential Soviet influence
in the colonies in the unfolding events of the last decade of British imperial rule in these
territories. Officialdom was reiterating what they and Nkrumah knew to be salient to
them: their fear of communist influence in these colonies, and their felt need to arrest it.
It also validates what is known to be their awareness that Nkrumah knew he would be
pleasing them greatly by curbing communism in his colony.
On the other hand, the “extremists” attempts to push for social change from below
was suggestive to the colonial authorities of a leftwing/communist putsch and agenda and
it fed their fear of possible Soviet influence in the colonies. It made the aspirant African
political incumbents – the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs – i.e., the moderates, who were
working within officially accepted channels for change and largely exclusive of a
program of social change, more acceptable to colonial officials who became more
responsive to them.1248 As officials began to grant more concessions to the “moderates,”
the “moderates” pressed for more concession, until in the end, the grant of selfgovernment presented itself as the only rational way out, given official perceptions of
events. The dynamic of concession-granting to the moderates, propelled in important
ways by the fear of the alternative if not granted to them, that is, the fear of the extremists
and hence of communist Soviet Union gaining control in these colonies, and in context of
events in the colonies and in the international arena – led in the end to what became
precipitous decolonization.
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The grant of independence, beginning with the Gold Coast in 1956 in British
West Africa involved a move on the part of British officialdom to deter any perceived
radicals or extremists from coming into power by granting it to the “moderates” preemptively. The political parties – the parties of the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, the
“moderates,” including those right of center - that became inheritors of political power at
independence in these colonies could be said in this regard to have got power by default.
As the Northern Nigerian woman radical, Sawaba Gambo, expressed in regard to the
NPC political party which became the governing party in the North and in the Central
government at independence as well, “the NPC did not get independence, we did.”1249
She was referring to the struggles of such social radicals like herself and those in NEPU
and elsewhere in British West Africa who colonial officials were very apprehensive of
and labeled as “extremists” and “communists.” She contrasted their form of social
intervention with the self-enlightened politics of the Northern conservative elites who
composed the NPC party and to whom political power was transferred at Nigeria’s
independence. Sawaba judged that the nation, and the NPC, could not have got
independence without the struggle of people like them who were important catalyst in
what this study refers to as precipitous decolonization. Writ large, the inference was that
the process of decolonization that started in the Gold Coast and which was extended to
the rest of British West African colonies, was predicated in important ways on the
activities of social radicals like her. Their discursive practices in regard to community
and citizenship had become threatening to the British colonial power and to their
continued influence in this region of Africa which they believed the Soviet Union would
like to gain control of, as elsewhere in the Wes’s spheres of influence. It forced
officialdom into quickly granting independence and handing over power to those who
they felt safe with – the “moderates” i.e., the ethnopolitical entrepreneurs - and safe to
leave at the helm of their nation’s affairs and for the future well-being of the mother
country, Britain. It involved a pre-emptive move to prevent those like Sawaba and
others, perceived by the British colonial officials as communist-influenced or Soviet
propaganda-prone, from gaining control and allowing the Soviet Union a foothold in
these countries and region of Africa.
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Officials were convinced that the “extremists” would take these colonies out of
the sphere of Western influence and into the Soviet bloc should they gain power in a selfgoverning African nation-state. On the other hand, they perceived that the “moderates,”
their current working partners, to be more pro-West and able to retain the colonies within
British/Western sphere of influence should power devolve to them instead. In his
minutes on future policy towards political and constitutional evolution, prepared ahead of
Nkrumah’s meeting with the SOS earlier in 1951, Cohen had expressed that:
The purpose of our policy in the Gold Coast ought in my
view to be a smooth and gradual advance towards
responsible government. It must be our aim on the one
hand to keep on good terms with the Gold Coast political
leaders so that when the time comes the Gold Coast will
elect voluntarily to remain within the Commonwealth.1250
The Secretary of State, Mr. Lyttelton, in 1953, in inviting his colleagues to approve in
broad principles the latest proposals by him for new constitutional instrument for the
Gold Coast (it became the basis of the Gold Coast Independence Constitution) which was
to be submitted to the Privy Council early in 1954, wrote:
The Gold Coast proposals, far reaching as they are, have
been prepared with care by a moderate African
Government anxious to avoid any break in relations with
the United Kingdom. … Their rejection would bring to an
end settled government by consent, and forfeit the goodwill
towards the United Kingdom and the desire to retain the
British connection (emphasis mine).1251
The “moderates” in government were also already being perceived to be doing a
good job in shutting the door on any possible communist/Soviet penetration in the
colonies.1252 In the Gold Coast, the official report in 1954 noted that “overt communist
activity is non-existent, as far as Government or the Civil Service are concerned.”1253
This was said to be due to “the energetic action of the Prime Minister, Dr. Kwame
Nkrumah.”1254 In the Legislative Council Session of 25th February, 1954, Nkrumah, as
Prime Minister, had made the important announcement that colonial officials had
expected of him in regard to the new government's position on communism and
communists in the colony. On that day, Nkrumah made the desired announcement in the
legislature that any person who had been proved to be an active communist would be
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refused employment in the public service. He even went further to elaborate, quoting the
1948 statement of the British Prime Minister, Mr. C. Attlee,1255 that such allegiance was
inimical to the State. He went on to say that the Gold Coast was not freeing itself from
one imperialism to fall under another.1256 That must have been sweet music to the ears of
colonial officials – Soviet imperialism will not be allowed to replace Western
imperialism under the rule of Mr. Kwame Nkrumah! What better African partner to
devolve power to?!! Kwame Nkrumah and the British colonial officials had indeed come
a long way!!!
Rushing to Decolonize
In officialdom’s reasoning, it was crucial to grant full self-government to the
perceived moderates then as pre-emptive moves to deter any extremists from coming to
power. They feared that continued denial of full self-government may generate more
crises which they strongly felt the “extremists” and “communists” would exploit and in
the process take these colonies “the way of the ‘commies.”’ Although the Colonial
Office was in doubt about the “ability of the Gold Coast to make the grade as an
independent country,”1257 they were sure that, given the on-going clamor for selfgovernment by the Gold Coast electorate, the choice before them, as expressed by R. J.
Vile, “may well then be one of accepting independence at a certain date because its
refusal would create worse conditions than its acceptance.”1258 Also, while officialdom
was convinced that delaying the grant of independence would bring great advantages in
the field of future domestic administration, they were certain that unless delay was clearly
the result of internal factors, postponement “would have great dangers for future external
relations, and these dangers outweigh domestic administrative considerations.”1259
Colonial officials knew that there was need for more time to develop the
administrative infrastructures in the Gold Coast, as well as in the rest of their West
African colonies. This included the training of more Africans to fill the numerous
administrative positions that would be left vacant at independence due to anticipated
voluntary return of many expatriate Britons. They also felt that in the Gold Coast, given
time, there could be better choices of “moderate” political parties to hand over power to
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and with a more developed and effective opposition. However, though the British held to
the belief that the leadership of Gold Coast government as constituted was not likely to
be of high quality, that the political ideas and methods of the CPP were crude, that they
lacked a sense of reality, and were “mercurial,” and thought better of the opposition,1260
they stuck with the CPP. They were ready to hand over the reins of government to the
CPP for the overriding reasons stated above and because they believed that the CPP
under Nkrumah had those bases covered - has proved it would be pro-West and anticommunist! British officialdom knew time was needed for the opposition and a more
highly-regarded moderate alternative political party to develop in the Gold Coast, given
the considerable lack of political development hitherto not only in the Gold Coast but in
the other colonies as well. But time was also of the essence to them and officialdom
could not afford that time.
The Colonial Office was even more skeptical of the readiness of Nigeria for full
self-government, given its heterogeneity, the problem of the North, etc. The SOS,
commenting on the Nigerian constitutional conference in London in 1953, remarked: “I
can only claim as chairman to have concealed, I hope completely, the mounting
impatience and deepening cynicism with which I have looked out upon this motley
assembly tackling the niceties of constitutional balance.”1261 It will also be recalled that a
major reason given by Cohen against moving too quickly on the pace of constitutional
change in the Gold Coast during his attendance at the meeting of the Secretary of State
with Nkrumah on 13th June, 1951 was his felt need for “developing administrative and
political efficiency so that the country continues to be well governed.”1262 These had not
occurred either in the Gold Coast or in any of the other British West African colonies by
this time.
There were indeed many compelling reasons not to decolonize at the time they
did. It could be reasoned that there was need for more time to properly reconcile the
contradictions of political decentralization and economic centralization, or of the parallel
developments of two divergent forms of rule in individual territories, etc. But
officialdom had proved incapable of resolving this dilemma and by mid-50s, the concern
to hand over power quickly to the “moderates” so as to keep these anticipated new states
pro-West had become overriding. And once officials higher up saw the grant of full self-
284
government to the Gold Coast in 1956 as the solution in the circumstance and had got
into the mode to decolonize, the rush to effect this and to hand over power to the
“moderates” in a self-governing nation-state began, starting with the Gold Coast in 1956.
This was followed by Nigeria in 1960 and by Sierra Leone and Gambia in 1961. The
rush was such that colonial officials lower down the scale in the colonies had to be
persuaded and made to feel ready for the wind of change.
The grant of self-government to the four British West African colonies became
the unintended consequence of a process that officials were unable to “order” or control.
The significance of officialdom’s fear of colonial social radicals’ alliance with the
anticolonial left and of communism in the colonies in the process that ended empire is
underscored in the 1954 Official Reports. The 1954 Reports happily noted at that time
the absence of any real localized theme in communist propaganda in the Gold Coast1263
as a surprising lacuna in the usually efficient Moscow technique and attributed it to be
due to two causes.1264 One of these causes was believed to be due to “the imminent
granting of self government to the Gold Coast which has robbed the Communists of the
familiar 'imperialist argument.”1265 It concluded by saying that “the granting of self
government to the Gold Coast has cut the ground from under the feet of the
Communists.”1266 That was a strong affirmation of an essential objective of what
officialdom intended the grant of self-government to these colonies to achieve. The grant
of self-government to the African “moderates” also assured officialdom of the protection
of their sphere of influence from the reach of the Kremlin.1267 And thus, officialdom
became relieved of the weight of communism on their mind - in this part of empire.
To conclude, officialdom relieved itself of the burden of empire in these West
African colonies and left, though making sure to leave it in the hands of those they
believed would retain the newly-independent states in the sphere of the West. But they
left unresolved the many problems and contradictions that colonialism created and/or
perpetuated: the problem of the bifurcated state, i.e., the two regimes of power - urban,
Western parliamentary-based and rural custom-based under a single hegemonic authority;
problem of democracy; problem of colonial arbitrary borders; and the problem of
Africa’s social pluralism, etc. These continue to plague post-independent African states
and to create challenges for sustainable governance and for the creation of viable nation-
285
states, and beg the issue of social change and social transformation in these societies.
Many of the current issues confronting African states and society: issues of democracy,
of individual rights versus collective self-determination, etc., were privileged by colonial
social radicals but were delegitimized by British officialdom, as this study has attempted
to reveal. Colonial social radicals’ discourse – the supplementary discourse – and the
range of other possible social interventions were closed off by officialdom. The states
that African rulers inherited at independence were the product of the construction of
community and notions of citizenship predicated on more narrow forms of political and
cultural address. Also, the language of culture that formed important components of
African cultural producers and political entrepreneurs discursive practices in the terms in
which it was constituted intercepted with the language of rights in colonial radicals’
discourse and in other variety of moral discourses in the pre-independence period, with
relevance in the post-independence period.
African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs gave short shrift to the issue of democracy.
In post-independence Africa, the state was de-racialized but not democratized. Both in
the pre-independence period and post-independence period, the issue of democracy was
made to play a secondary role to that of development by African politicians and rulers.
“Development” was a central component of “nation-forming.” By the end of the 1970s,
however, the “nationalist” development project failed to materialize, as epitomized in the
failure of the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) enforced on these less-economically
developed states by the World Bank. The failure of the SAP marked a major defeat of
the “developmentalist project.” In their imagining of the nation as based on community
conceived of as fraternity of equals, etc., the colonial social radicals left a legacy for the
imagining and/or reimagining of community and of citizenship in more democratic and
inclusive terms.
The legacy of social pluralism in African states that colonialism left also
continues to pose challenges for community-building and notions of citizenship in
African societies. Thandika Mkandawire commented that neither African politicians nor
radicalized “nationalists” addressed the significance of Africa’s social pluralism in
conflating tribalism with identity.1268 He points to the importance of considering the
alternative construction of the nation-state in terms of (viable) multi-ethnic, multicultural
286
or multiracial terms which he noted was never considered by either categories in their
construction of the nation.1269 The colonial social radicals examined in this study are,
however, revealed to begin to address such issues in their discursive practices, predicated
on the building of National Societies, and leaving a legacy for post-independent Africa.
It is also possible to consider geographically reconstructing the nation-state in
Africa and the boundaries inherited at independence1270 as these are mostly arbitrary and
fluid and there is nothing sacrosanct about colonial national borders. Like all other social
identities, national identity is also imagined, constructed, and assembled from
characteristics that, in altered circumstances, can become the basis of quite different
kinds of social identities. So why cannot the borders of the state be reconstructed to
make the boundaries of the African states coincide in the main with those of nationalities
that want to remain together? On the other hand, however, borders are very difficult, if
not impossible to adjust. As Hechter commented, the permanence of borders is among
the most tenaciously held givens in political culture.1271
In the open-ended debate and question of how far the institutions and culture of
Western liberal democracy and the historical legacy of liberalism are sufficient criteria
for democratic citizenship in post-colonial Africa, the challenge of the possibility of an
African conception of citizenship had been raised among scholars.1272 An examination of
the terms in which community and notions of citizenship were imagined, claimed, and
contested among the various social forces, in particular by colonial social radicals, in the
pre-independence period may provide some valuable insights into the reconstitution and
reconceptualization of community and citizenship in African societies.
287
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ARCHIVES
Nigerian National Archive, Ibadan
Chief F. O. Cokers Papers
Chief Beyioku Papers
Ransome Kuti Papers: Records of the Abeokuta Women’s Union
Herbert Macauley Papers
Records of the Benin Community Movement
297
Selected Records of the Lagos Market Women’s Union
Reuter's Report on the Assassination of Zik (undated document)
Nigerian National Archive, Kaduna
Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) Papers
Report of the Kano Disturbances: 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th May, 1953
Public Records Office, Kew Gardens, London
Colonial Office Records, 1920 - 1960
Foreign Office Records, 1920 - 1960
WASU Magazine, 1929 – 1948
Rhodes House, Oxford
Fabian Colonial Bureau Papers
Milverton, A. F., Tape recording and transcripts of an interview with A.H.M. Kirk-Green
in MSS.Brit.Emp.s.368
Arthur Creech-Jones Papers
Marx House, London
Communist Party of Great Britain Papers
DOCUMENTS
Ronald Hyam. ed. British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. II: The Labour
Government and the End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 1 (London: HMSO, 1992).
----------------------: British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. II: The Labour
Government and the End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 2: (London: HMSO, 1992).
----------------------: British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. II: The Labour
Government and the End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London: HMSO, 1992).
David Goldsworthy. ed. British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. III: The
Conservative Government and the End of Empire 1951-1957, Part 1 (London: HMSO, 1994).
------------------------------: British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. III: The
Conservative Government and the End of Empire 1951-1957, Part 2 (London: HMSO, 1994).
298
OFFICIAL PUBLICATIONS & REPORTS
Commission Appointed to Enquire into the Fears of Minorities and the Means of Allaying them.
Report. Cmnd. 505. London, 1958
Collections, Hoover Institute, Stanford University.
Legislative Council Debates, Gold Coast, 1944 –1954
Legislative Council Debates, Nigeria, 1940 - 1958
Legislative Council Debates, Sierra Leone, 1947 – 1957
Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Disturbances in the Gold Coast, 1948, Colonial No.
231 (His Majesty’s Stationery Office: London).
USCIA Reports: Communism in Africa, 1945-1960, Michigan State University
NEWSPAPERS
Daily Comet (Lagos)
Daily Service (Lagos and Ibadan)
Daily Times (Lagos)
Daily Worker (London)
Newswatch (Lagos)
New Breed (Lagos)
West Africa (London)
West African Pilot (Lagos)
Negro Worker (Europe)
MEMOIRS
Awolowo, O. AWO: The Autobiography of Chief Obafemi Awolowo. London: Cambridge
University Press: London, 1960.
Azikiwe, Nnamdi. My Odyssey: An Autobiography. London: C. Hurst, 1970.
Bello, Ahamadu, Sir. My Life. Cambridge: University Press, 1962.
Nkrumah, Kwame. The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah. Edinburgh; New York: T. Nelson,
1957.
Okoye, Mokwugo. Rebel Line: Memoirs of Revolutionary Struggles in Nigeria and Other Essays
Onitsha, Nigeria: Efudo Ltd., 1962.
Ohiare, Philip, Adaiyi. Late Alhaji Habib Raji Abdallah's Memorial Pamphlet. Nigeria: Nigerian
Herald, 1983.
299
Stevens, Siaka. What Life Has Taught Me. Bourne End, England: Kensal House, 1972.
Yusuf, Ahmed, Beita. A Freedom Fighter: Annotated Memoirs of Mallam Illah Ringim. Sidi
Umaru Press: Sokoto, Nigeria, 1978.
INTERVIEWS
Alhaja Hajiyya Sawaba Gambo, Zaria, Nigeria, August 1990.
Chief Nwafor Orizu, Ananaba State, Nigeria, August, 1990.
Michael Imoudu, Lagos, August, 1990.
300
Preface
1
For some of my earlier works on the subject of nationalism in the 80s and 90s, see, Nike L Edun Adebiyi,
“Radical Nationalism in British West Africa, 1945-56,” University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan,
1994@, “Deconstructing Nationalism: Towards a Social History of the Pre-independence Movements in
British West Africa, 1900-1945,” Paper presented at the Council for the Development of Economic and
Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA), Methodological Seminar on Social Movements, Social
Transformation, and the Struggle for Democracy in Africa, Algiers, Algeria, July 18-20, 1990, “Radical
Nationalism and the Politics of Anticolonialism in British West Africa, 1940-1960,” Paper presented at the
Project on International Communism, Conference III, Metropolitan and Third World Lefts, 1917-1985,
University of Michigan, January 27, 1989, “Social Groups in the National Colonial Movement in British
West Africa: 1945-60,” Paper presented at the Council for the Development of Economic and Social
Research in Africa (CODESRIA), Methodological Seminar on Social Movements, Social Transformation,
and the Struggle for Democracy in Africa, Harare, Zimbabwe, June 1-3, 1988, “Nationalism as a Problem
in Communist Thought: A Case-study of the National Colonial Question in the Communist International
with Particular Reference to West Africa,” Seminar Paper, History department, University of Michigan,
1986, and “Main Ideological Currents in West Africa’s Nationalist Movement: An Exploratory Study,”
Seminar Paper, History Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1985.
2
Nike L. Edun Adebiyi, “Radical Nationalism in British West Africa, 1945-56,” University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1994@.
3
The interview with Hajiyya Sawaba Gambo, the Islamic radical woman activist, in Kano yielded more
desired result. Chief Orizu was too ill to conduct a proper interview and died before a second one could
take place. Orizu was an ex-Zikist who also coined the phrase, Zikism and was the main founder of the
Zikist Movement, though he was more moderately-inclined. Michael Imoudu, the Nigerian radical labor
leader, was also too old to effectively recall the events of the time.
4
Research in the U.S. included examination of holdings at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University,
Schomburg Papers in New York Library, the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan Library, and
the United States Central Intelligence Agency (USCIA) Papers and newspaper collections at the Africana
Library, Michigan State University (MSU), Lansing, Michigan.
5
Roger Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2004).
6
Supplementary discourse and minority discourse are used interchangeably in this study.
7
See Women's Union, “Suggested Reforms for The E.N.A.,” 6/8/48, Ransome Kuti Papers.
8
Ibid.
9
“Women Out of Egba Court: Suggestion Contrary To Custom and Constitution. Hostile Demonstrations
and Assemblies Are Banned: D.O. Reads Order,” Daily Times, September 22, 1948.
10
Laurent Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago, Ill:
University of Chicago Press, 1991). Colonial social radicals’ ineffective grasp of the cultural imperative is
discussed in chapter seven.
11
The contesting discourses and practices of ethnopolitical entrepreneurs and colonial social radials are
explored in chapters six and seven, respectively.
12
Homi Bhabha, “Dissemination: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation,” in Nation and
Narration, ed., Homi Bhabha, 305-306 (London: Routledge, 1990, repr. 1993).
13
My works since the 80s on the phenomenon of nationalism have also represented my attempts to fill that
gap because of the importance that I believe these themes deserve. Although John Hargreaves, a respected
301
British historian of empire, had also drawn attention to the significance of studying the theme of
communism in regard to the Comintern and anti-colonialism in 1993, it still remains largely an unexplored
theme, particularly in relation to the phenomenon of nationalism and the end of empire in British West
Africa. See John D. Hargreaves, “The Comintern and anti-colonialism: new research opportunities,”
African Affairs 92, no. 367 (April 1993): 255-263.
14
Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: the Left and the End of Empire, 19181964 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
15
Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain, 1900-1960: Nationalism, Pan Africanism and Communism
(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1998).
16
The Secretary of State, Mr. Lyttelton, had expressed this view in 1953, consonant with how the British
had viewed the Northern emirate system from the consolidation of empire and the establishment of the
Lugardian Indirect Rule system in this place in 1914. By contrast, Lyttelton characterized the Yorubas and
the Ibos of the South, the two remaining of the three major nationality groups in Nigeria, as “Pagan or
Christian, with higher education and lower manners … somewhat intoxicated with nationalism, though
loyal to the British connection at least so long as it suits them”! See “The Nigerian constitution: Cabinet
memorandum by Mr. Lyttelton,” 17 August 1953, PREM 11/1367, C(53)235, [274], reprinted in David
Goldsworthy (ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. III: The Conservative
Government and the End of Empire 1951-1957, Part 2 (London: HMSO, 1994), 200.
17
Colonial Office Report, 1947, CO 537/2573/11020/30 and CO 537/2573/11020/30/1, PRO.
18
Eyo Ita’s objections to the deliberations and outcome of the 1949/50 Constitutional Conferences in
Nigeria which preceded the granting of the 1951 Constitution in Nigeria was based precisely on the
shortcomings of previous constitutions and on the need to amend them at that time, given the opportunity
provided. His concerns and suggestions were not heeded, however, and he, together with Mbonu Ojike,
produced a Minority Report of their own which detailed at length suggestions for fundamental and
democratic changes in all organs of government. Eyo Ita was a graduate of Columbia University in the
U.S., and a representative member of the NCNC on the 1949/50 Nigerian Constitutional Review
Committee. He and Ojike were told by the colonial government not to “take the nation by storm.” To Sir
T. Lloyd from Mr. Cohen, “Political Development of Nigeria, 10.5.50,” in CO 537/5786, PRO.
19
Northern Elements Progressive Union, “Views on the Nigerian Constitution Conference, 1956,” NEPU
Papers, Nigerian Archives, Kaduna.
20
Ibid.
21
“Egba Alake’s Section Who Are the Paramount Owners of Oba Alake Still Oppose Ademola’s Return,”
signed by F. Ransome-Kuti, Women’s Union Abeokuta, undated memo, additional enclosure in “Letter
from Funmi Ransome Kuti to Mr. Griffith, 13.12.50,” Ransome Kuti Papers.
22
“Abeokuta: Is All Well,” Editorial, Western Echo, February 9th, 1948.
23
British colonial officials affirmed the intention of the NPC party and Native Authorities in the North,
consistent with their own position, to adapt and not to destroy the traditional system of authority which
NEPU sought to reform or transform. “The Nigerian constitution: Cabinet memorandum by Mr. Lyttelton,”
17 August 1953, PREM 11/1367, C(53)235, [274], reprinted in David Goldsworthy (ed.), British
Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. III: The Conservative Government and the End of Empire
1951-1957, Part 2 (London: HMSO, 1994).
24
Ibid.
25
“Chief Commissioner Speaks On Egba Women’s Agitation,” His Honor and Chief Commissioner
Western Provinces, Mr. T. Hoskyns-Abrahall, C. M. G., Address to the Chief and People of Egbaland in
Council Hall, in the Daily Times, Tuesday 27th April 1948.
26
Ibid.
27
See, for example, Nike L. Edun Adebiyi, “Radical Nationalism in British West Africa, 1945-56,”
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1994@, and “Radical Nationalism and the Politics of
302
Anticolonialism in British West Africa, 1940-1960,” Paper presented at the Project on International
Communism, Conference III, Metropolitan and Third World Lefts, 1917-1985, University of Michigan,
January 27, 1989.
28
Hechter notes that there may well be a resurgence of class-based movements if welfarism failed. See
Michael Hechter, Containing Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2002).
29
“[Gold Coast]: minute by A B Cohen on future policy towards political and constitutional evolution,” 11
June 1951, CO 537/7181, [226], reprinted in Ronald Hyam (ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire.
Series A, Vol. II: The Labour Government and the End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London: HMSO,
1992), 73. A. B. Cohen was the Assistant Under-Secretary of State from 1947 to 1951.
30
Ibid. Nkrumah was by this time being reconstituted into the category of the “moderates.” This shift
among officialdom and Nkrumah (and also Azikiwe in Nigeria) is discussed in chapters five and eight.
31
“[West Africa]: memorandum by A B Cohen on Anglo-French relations: survey of constitutional
progress in British territories,” [Extract], 20 Nov 1951, CO 537/7148, no 17, [228], reprinted in Ronald
Hyam (ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. II: The Labour Government and the
End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London: HMSO, 1992), 77.
32
Ibid.
33
“Gold Coast constitution: Cabinet memorandum by Mr. Creech Jones,” 8 Oct 1949, CAB 129/36/2,
CP(49)199, [217], reprinted in Ronald Hyam (ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol.
II: The Labour Government and the End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London: HMSO, 1992), 49.
34
It is to be noted that the Gold Coast was the lynchpin of developments and changes in the British West
African colonies.
35
“[Gold Coast constitution]: minutes by Sir C Jeffries and Mr. Lyttelton, 9 Feb 1953,” CO 554/254, [267],
reprinted in David Goldsworthy (ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. III: The
Conservative Government and the End of Empire 1951-1957, Part 2 (London: HMSO, 1994), 189. Sir
Charles J. Jefferies, the Deputy Under-Secretary of State (1947-1956), had expressed to Lyttelton earlier in
February 1953 that he thought it was a “misfortune” the way British officialdom was moving too fast on
the pace of constitutional developments and had hoped that it mighty be their general policy to “call a halt
to this process.”
36
The proposals would introduce a new government consisting of an All-African cabinet presided by the
Prime Minister, advised by a European Economic and Financial Adviser and a European Attorney-General;
it also involved new Electoral Ordinance for fresh elections with an extended franchise, etc.
“Constitutional developments in the Gold Coast: Cabinet memorandum by Mr. Lyttelton,” 4 Sep 1953,
CAB 129/62, C(53)244, [275], reprinted in David Goldsworthy (ed.), British Documents on the End of
Empire. Series A, Vol. III: The Conservative Government and the End of Empire 1951-1957, Part 2
(London: HMSO, 1994), 204. His advice was in view of potential dissenting opinions among British
officialdom in Britain, and the French government, who believed the British were moving too fast on the
pace of constitutional change and political devolution in their West African colonies.
37
It became the basis of the Gold Coast Independence Constitution.
38
“Assessment of Anti-Communist Propaganda,” Accra, April 23, 1956, United Kingdom Information
Office in the Gold Coast, Political Developments: Gold Coast, CO 554/1177, PRO, London. The 1954
Intelligence Reports had happily noted at that time the absence of any real localized theme in communist
propaganda in the Gold Coast.
Chapter One
39
In seeking to raise questions about the unit of analysis – the ethnic group - and the domain of analysis –
ethnicity itself, Brubaker has advocated bringing to bear new sets of analytical perspectives, such as
303
cognitive theory, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and institutional theory, in the analysis of the
concept of “ethnicity.” He suggested that cognitive perspectives, broadly understood, could help advance
constructivist research on ethnicity, race, and nationhood. See Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups,
17, 27.
40
Kathleen Canning has suggested that notions of gender could be broken up and reconfigured by
exploring how women sought to contest received understandings of rights and duties and how the resulting
histories impacted their subjectivities. See Kathleen Canning, “Class vs. Citizenship: Keywords in German
Gender History,” Central European History 37, no. 2 (2004): 225-44.
41
The perspective of citizenship is being explored of recent as an important category through which the
meanings of such constructs like class, gender, and ethnicity, concepts associated with the construct of the
nation, could be more successfully reconfigured as scholars explore the fluidity and complexity of these
concepts. Geoff Eley has argued, for example, in his works on German history, that the perspective of
citizenship could provide a new paradigm for understanding the history of Wilhemine Germany. See Geoff
Eley, “Making a Place in the Nation: Meanings of ‘Citizenship’ in Wilhemine Germany,” in Wilhelminism
and its Legacies: German Modernities, Imperialism, and the Meanings of Reform, 1890-1930, eds., G. Eley
and J. Retallack, 16-33 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003). The perspective of citizenship also forms the
central focus of scholarly contributions to the exploration of national identity in twentieth century Germany
in his latest edited book. See, Geoff Eley and Jan Palmowski, eds., Citizenship and National Identity in
Twentieth-Century Germany (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2008).
42
The notion of citizenship applied in this study includes “cultural citizenship” and is applied in relational
and non-fixed but general sense to refer to individual’s formal belonging to a state, the objective rights and
duties enjoyed by the citizen, and the subjective use of those rights and the “meanings” ascribed by
individuals to the rights they enjoyed as citizens. This cuts across periods and societies and definitely
relates to how individuals and groups have conceived themselves and their place in society, including rights
and duties, in African societies across historical periods.
43
The African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs are the political entrepreneurs and cultural entrepreneurs and
are used interchangeably in this study. They refer to are those who expect their wealth, power or prestige
to increase with the attainment of self-government as well as to distinct intelligentsia, purveyors of distinct
cultural goods. Colonial radicals are those who stood at the critical gateway between various social forces urban and rural social forces - symbolizing the ordinary people seeking to renegotiate the terms of their
incorporation in colonial society and to reconfigure community and forms of citizenship in more inclusive
and egalitarian ways.
44
Brubaker has emphasized the need to examine the process by which categories become transformed into
groups, how and why and to what effect. See Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups.
45
As stated in the preface, many of the social radicals and their political organizations had, in fact,
originated from within the womb of more mainstream political or cultural organizations, like the Zikists in
the National Convention of Nigeria and the Cameroon (NCNC) and the Northern Elements Progressive
Union (NEPU) in the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) in Nigeria, etc. They had initially existed within
them with the intent of radicalizing these more mainstream political organizations from within and to move
them along more democratic and socially radical agendas. But they did not and could not long subsist
within the parent body as they were removed or forced out from them within a short period because of the
conflicts in their perspectives on the nation and citizenry! For example, the radicals in NEPU had initially
existed in the Northern Peoples’ Congress (NPC) with the intent of operating as a political vanguard within
the broader but more conservative NPC which was then more or less a cultural organization of entrenched
interests in Northern Nigeria but the conservatives in the NPC and who dominated it soon worked to
exclude NEPU from it. Powerful emirs and certain administrative officers regarded the NEPU within the
NPC then, with its radicalizing initiatives, as a “dangerously radical group” and sought to eliminate the
radical elements from the NPC. Conservatives and moderates within the NPC secured the adoption of a
resolution to the effect that no member of the NEPU could remain as a member of the NPC. NEPU’s wing
of the Kano delegation thereupon broke with the NPC and the NPC was thereafter converted into a political
party for the use of conservative politicians. See, for example, Richard L. Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties:
Power in an Emergent African Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), 95-96. Some women
304
social radicals also affiliated their organization with the more mainstream parties at certain stage of their
organizations’ development, such as the Abeokuta Women’s Union (AWU) in the NCNC and CummingsJohn’s Sierra Leone Women’s Movement (SLWM) with the SLPP, with the aim of impacting these
political parties from within towards more democratic changes but they failed to do so and most of the
affiliations were short-lived.
46
See, for example, the account of the resistance of men in such regions as the Futa Jallon, notorious for its
religious and social conservatism, in Elizabeth Schmidt, “‘Emancipate Your Husbands!’ Women and
Nationalism in Guinea, 1953-1958,” in Women in African Colonial Histories, eds., Jean Allman, Susan
Geiger, and Nakanyike Mussi, 282-304 (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002).
47
Women's Union, “Suggested Reforms for The E.N.A.,” 6/8/48, Ransome Kuti Papers.
48
See, “Women Out of Egba Court: Suggestion Contrary To Custom and Constitution. Hostile
Demonstrations and Assemblies Are Banned: D.O. Reads Order,” Daily Times, September 22, 1948. The
colonial authorities were electing a handful of women into the newly constituted governing Council, the
(ECC), in the late 40s, a right to which Funlayo Ransome-Kuti had fought for in the famous Abeokuta
Women’s Movement (AWU).
49
In his recent study of the politics and discourse centered around belonging and exclusion in the
Democratic Republic of Congo, Stephen Jackson comments on how such vernaculars like the
autochthony/allochthony duality draw energy from imprecise overlaps with other powerful pre-existing
identity polarities at particular scales of identity and difference: local, provincial, national, and regional.
He remarks that the slipperiness between different scales of meaning permits the speaker to leave open
multiple interpretations and that this indefiniteness is a “paradoxical source of the discourse’s strength and
weakness, suppleness and nervousness, its declarative mood and attendant paranoia.” See Stephen Jackson,
“Sons of Which Soil? The Language and Politics of Autochthony in Eastern D.R. Congo,” African Studies
Review 49, no. 2 (Sept, 2006): 95.
50
Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration, 294.
51
“Community” and “nation” are sometimes used interchangeably and as appropriate in this work.
52
Raymond William’s 1958 essay, “Culture is Ordinary,” is sensitive to questions of power inequality and
marginalization of certain voices within the common culture. See Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope:
Culture, Democracy, Socialism (London: Verso, 1989), 3-18.
53
Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration. The master-discourse in this study was the discourse that
officialdom allowed space for while they tried to close off the space for the discourse that they did not want
centered – the minority/supplementary discourse. There were variations within and between these main
trends and they sometimes existed in dialectical relationship to each other, as this study attempts to also
reveal.
54
Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration, 305.
55
Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 1986).
56
Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation,” in Nation and
Narration, 305.
57
Ibid., 305-306.
58
Ibid., 308.
59
Ibid., 307.
60
Ibid.
61
Ibid., 306.
62
Perceived social radicals were feared by colonial authorities as potential conduit pipe for the infiltration
of communism into these West African colonies, both in the heyday of the Communist International and in
the post World War II Cold War rivalry between the East and the West.
305
63
“Communist” was in a sense a label that British officialdom applied to any colonial or colonial
organization that they did not like and this categorization was what made the diverse socially relevant
interventions of colonials cohere. This was demonstrated, for example, in the reaction of the Governor of
the Gold Coast, Sir Gerald Creasy, to the 1948 Gold Coast crises, examined in chapter four. Creasy
immediately interpreted the crisis as a sort of communist conspiracy, while the causes of the crises were
more deep-seated and multifaceted, as the Colonial Office would later be made to realize by the Report of
the Watson Commission of Inquiry that was sent to investigate the outbreak of the crises.
64
The end of empire in Africa has been a subject of debate among various schools of thought. It has
moved from the school of planned and guided devolution among revisionist historians such as Prosser
Gifford and Roger Louis (1988), Curtis R. Nordman (1976), and R. D. Pearce (1982) who argued that the
initiatives rested solely in British official hands, to the school of unplanned devolution such as Cell (1980)
and to that which examined the relationship between events in the colonies, i.e., the weight of colonial
pressures, and metropolitan policy making, such as the school of thought represented by Jane Bowden
(1980). For these schools, see, for example, Prosser Gifford and Wm. Roger Louis, eds., Decolonization
and African Independence: The Transfer of Power, 1960-1980 (New Have: Yale University, 1988), Curtis
R. Nordman, “Prelude to Decolonization in West Africa: The Development of British Colonial Policy,
1938-1947,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, Oxford University, 1976, R. D. Pearce, The Turning Point
in Africa: British Colonial Policy, 1938-1948 (London: Cass, 1982), John W. Cell, “On the Eve of
Decolonization: The Colonial Office’s Plan for the Transfer of Power in Africa, 1947,” Journal of Imperial
and Commonwealth History 8, no. 3 (May 1980): 250-256, and J. H. Bowden, “Development and Control
in British Colonial Policy: Nigeria and the Gold Coast, 1935-48,” doctoral dissertation, University of
Birmingham, England, 1980. The debate has advanced further in more recent times towards the
understanding of the end of empire in processual and dialectical terms in relation to internal processes in
the colonies and in the metropolis and internationally. See, for example, Fred Cooper, Decolonization and
African Society : the Labor Question in French and British Africa.
65
A few studies that have been carried out in regard to communism or leftwing movements and British
imperialism have focused more on the politics of anti-colonialism by the left in British politics. See, for
example, Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1993), and
Partha Gupta, Imperialism and the British Labor Movement, 1814-1964 (New York: Holmes and Meier
Publisher, 1975). Hakim Adi’s study comes closer to an examination of communism and nationalism but is
limited to the activities of West African students in Britain. See, Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain,
1900-1960: Nationalism, Pan Africanism and Communism (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1998). For a
general account in relation to Pan-Africanism from an ideological viewpoint, see George Padmore. PanAfricanism or Communism (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1971). A few other earlier works that
touch on communist activities in limited forms in West Africa include Ayodele J. Langley, Pan Africanism
and Nationalism in West Africa; a Study in Ideology and Social Classes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973),
and Immanuel Geis, The Pan African Movement (London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1974).
66
I try to show that British officialdom’s anticommunist framework clearly imposed a grid of analysis on
the broad spectrum of African politics and simplifies an otherwise complex phenomenon.
67
This is fully discussed and detailed in chapters five and eight below.
68
“[Gold Coast]: minute by A B Cohen on future policy towards political and constitutional evolution,” 11
June 1951, CO 537/7181, [226], reprinted in Ronald Hyam (ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire.
Series A, Vol. II: The Labour Government and the End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London: HMSO,
1992), 74.
69
Ibid. It is also to be noted that the Gold Coast was the lynchpin of developments and changes in the
British West African colonies
70
“[West Africa]: memorandum by A B Cohen on Anglo-French relations: survey of constitutional
progress in British territories,” [Extract], 20 Nov 1951, CO 537/7148, no 17, [228], reprinted in Ronald
Hyam (ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. II: The Labour Government and the
End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London: HMSO, 1992), 77.
306
71
“Assessment of Anti-Communist Propaganda,” Accra, April 23, 1956, United Kingdom Information
Office in the Gold Coast, Political Developments: Gold Coast, CO 554/1177, PRO. The 1954 Reports had
happily noted at that time the absence of any real localized theme in communist propaganda in the Gold
Coast.
72
See discussion of this in Roger Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups.
73
They have been so constituted. As Brubaker commented, ‘ethnic’ conflict is not always a matter of
‘ethnic’ groups in conflict and the acts of framing and narrative encoding of it as such do not simply
interpret the violence but constitute it as “ethnic,” or even “nationalist.” Brubaker, Ethnicity without
Groups.
74
The term “nationalism” first appeared in a text written by Herder in 1774. See Peter Alter, Nationalism
(London: Edward Arnold, 1989), 7.
75
The growth of cultural studies in recent times has served to reinstate the centrality of culture in nationforming and to link social and individual lives.
76
Benedict Anderson’s work in 1983 is regarded to be emblematic text in marking this moment of
transition in the literature of nationalism. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on
the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983, rev. ed. 1991).
77
Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, 4, 27. He regards cognitive perspectives as providing valuable
resources for conceptualizing nation, ethnicity, race, sex, religion, etc., in a non-groupist manner. He
applies the same critique to the categories of race, sex, age, religion, ethnicity, etc.
78
Ibid., 11-12. By focusing on categories, Brubaker believes “ethnicity,” for example, could be envisioned
without groups.
79
Ibid.
80
Ibid., 11.
81
Ibid.
82
Kathleen Canning, “Class vs. Citizenship: Keywords in German Gender History,” Central European
History 37, no. 2 (2004): 225-44. See also, Kathleen Canning and Sonya O. Rose, “Introduction: Gender,
Citizenship, and Subjectivity: Some Historical and Theoretical Considerations,” Gender & History 13, no.
3 (2001): 227-41.
83
See Geoff Eley and Jan Palmowski eds. Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-Century
Germany, 7. See also, Geoff Eley, “Making a Place in the Nation: Meanings of Citizenship in Wilhelmine
Germany,” in Wilhelminism and its Legacies: German Modernities, Imperialism, and the Meanings of
Reform, 1890-1930, eds., G. Eley and J. Retallack, 16-33 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003).
84
The volatility and fluidity of ethnic identity are also noted by Martin Chanock in his book, Law Custom,
and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Zambia and Malawi (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985), and by Thomas Spear and Richard Waller in, Thomas Spear and Richard Waller, eds., Being
Maasai: Ethnicity and Identity in East Africa (London: James Currey, 1993). On the other hand, Thandika
Mkandawire believes that ethnic identity has been given a bad name by nationalists in conflating ethnic
identity with tribalism. He commented that “nationalism denied ethnic identity and considered any political
- or worse - economic claims based on these identities as diabolic as imperialism, if not worse.” See
Thandika Mkandawire, “African Intellectuals and Nationalism.” Lecture delivered in Australia, 2003, 2.
85
As Brubaker has commented, “nations,” “ethnicity,” “race,” etc., provide better insights into the
problems associated with nation-forming when conceptualized in relational, processual, dynamic, eventful,
and disaggregate terms and not, for example, as collective individuals as they have tended to be in social
science literature. Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups.
86
In seeking to address a problematic consequence of the tendency to take groups for granted in the study
of nationhood, ethnicity, and race, etc., Brubaker notes that the mere use of a term as a category of practice
307
does not disqualify it as a category of analysis. What is problematic, he remarked, is not that a particular
term is used but how it is used. Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups.
87
The larger concept of “We are all Africans” is also in question. See Ali A. Mazrui, Africanity Redefined.
edit., Ricardo René Laremont ... [et al.]. 51 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2002).
88
Mazrui also noted that the concept of Africa itself is in part the tyranny of cartographers, etc. Ibid.
89
What may constrain such attempts for the present and future is the international context that also makes it
difficult to sustain. Also, there are potentials for the development of the “nation” in mutually-inclusive
ways based on current borders of each state.
90
The field of cultural studies has contributed to the understanding of how the nation is represented, how
its origins and claims are narrated and how its aspirations are authorized.
91
See Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985).
92
Raymond Williams had earlier attested that “culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind.” He
further stated that culture has two aspects: “the known meanings and directions, which its members are
trained to; the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested.” See Raymond William’s
essay, “Culture is Ordinary,” in Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism (London: Verso,
1989), 4.
93
Ibid., 3-18.
94
Aspects of this are explored in chapter seven. In the interwar and immediate post-World War II period,
the theme of struggles of appropriation rather than anti-colonialism or ‘nationalism’ was a more appropriate
descriptions of the conflicts of interests in these West African social formations but the period witnessed
the onset of the process within which other varieties of politics, including 'nationalist' politics, were made
manifest. It may be correct to observe that many of the interwar activities and movements were
characteristic of societies in flux, analogous, though with very significant regional and local variations, to
those that had arisen historically in situations of rapid social change. These could be compared, in some
ways, to a particular stage of industrializing societies which generated movements like syndicalism,
anarchism, and even Marxism, in response to the attendant social dislocation.
95
Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996), 9.
96
The study contends that there were different social issues and different positions taken on them. It breaks
down the socially relevant issues into basic issues of social life where contradiction
97
Tradition was construed and misconstrued by all, i.e., colonial chiefs, local sub-chiefs, male fraternities,
and even British officialdom itself.
98
Geoff Eley and Jan Palmowski, eds., Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany, 7.
99
See, for example, Ndabanigi Sithole, African Nationalism (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), and
Boahen, Adu A. "Politics and Nationalism in West Africa," in Adu Boahen ed. General History of Africa,
Africa Under Colonial Domination 1880-1935.
100
A comparable weakness is revealed in earlier studies of this theme in other regional studies, including
Western European studies. A shared feature of these hitherto mainstream traditions of nationalist studies
has been its overtly intellectual and political thrusts and its tendency to abstract from the social base. For
the early school located among political and intellectual historians of Western Europe and North America
whose root goes far back to the eighteenth century German romanticist nationalist school, Herder and his
school, see Hans Kohn, The Age of Nationalism (New York: Harper, 1962) and The Idea of Nationalism,
2nd ed. (New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1967), and, Carlton J. H. Hayes, "Nationalism," Encyclopedia of
the Social Sciences, vol. II (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 240-49.
101
Earlier mainstream studies of nationalism in Africa, originating within conventional paradigms and
whose frame of analysis was influenced by the assumptions of the modernization school, had tended to
308
focus mainly on the phenomenon of politics and on the activities of African educated and commercial
elites. Their treatment of the movements of the period mainly as intellectual rather than as part of a
complex social phenomenon had tended to reduce these to the politics of mobilization by educated African
elites and to deny the examination of their subject as part of a process or system that is to be explained and
analyzed.
102
See, James S. Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1958).
103
See, for example, Richard Joseph, Radical Nationalism in Cameroun: Social Origins of the U.P.C.
Rebellion (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press), 1977, Tabitha Kanogo, Squatters and the Roots of
Mau Mau (London: J. Currey, 1987), and Richard Sklar, Nigerian Political parties (Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1963). Thomas Hodgkin’s work also provided an early understanding of the
rise of emergent social classes (forces) and new organizations. See, Thomas Hodgkin, Nationalism in
Colonial Africa (New York: New York University Press, 1975).
104
James Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism.
105
The enterprising intellectuals are the equivalent of the political entrepreneurs in this study.
106
More recent literatures have emphasized the need to constitute nations discursively, through a process of
imaginative ideological labor, i.e., the novelty of national culture, its manufactured or invented character,
as opposed to its deep historical rootedness. In the imaginative ideological labor involved in nationforming, Eley and Suny have noted, for example, the important role of the ‘enterprising intellectuals’ as
catalyst in the case of nation-forming in Central Europe and Transcaucasia in nineteenth century. See
Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader, 8.
107
See, Thomas Hodgkin, Nationalism in Colonial Africa, and Adu A. Boahen, "Politics and Nationalism
in West Africa."
108
Thomas Hodgkin, Nationalism in Colonial Africa, 23. Adu Boahen in his revisionist study also still
interprets the events of the period from 1919 to 1935 in British West Africa, for example, as nationalist
activities, regarding this period as that which saw African resistance to colonialism and nationalist activities
in this region at its peak. Boahen, Adu A. Boahen, "Politics and Nationalism in West Africa," 624.
109
It is premised on the notion that the idea of nationalism is predicated on a multiple complex of factors cultural, social, linguistic, psychological, ideological, and others, on which the actual thrust of politics is
based.
110
John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 4.
111
Peter Alter, Nationalism (London: Edward Arnold, 1989), 4.
112
Brubaker points to the problematic consequence of taking groups for granted in the study of nationhood,
ethnicity, races, etc., and would advocate the concept of groupness as a more valuable analytical tool in the
study of such phenomena. Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups.
113
My works on the subject of nationalism since the 80s have represented attempts to move the
understanding of the subject further by seeking to explore the phenomenon of nationalism in Africa within
a reconstituted conceptual framework. Other more recent works such as Fred Cooper’s examination of the
labor question in decolonization in Africa and Lynn Schler’s examination of the Douala city in colonial
Cameroons from a reconstituted methodological framework represent such new schools. See, for example,
Fred Cooper, Decolonization and African Society : The Labor Question in French and British Africa
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), and Lynn Schler, “History, the Nation-State, and
Alternative Narratives: An Example from Colonial Douala,” African Studies Review 48, no. 1 (April 2005):
89-108. Schler examines the community of strangers in New Bell Douala, Cameroons in the interwar
period in her attempt to offer an alternative to the nationalist narrative that had dominated the
historiography of Cameroon till recent. Commenting on the use of pidgin English among New Bell
immigrants and as an important step in the evolution of a multiethnic collective in Cameroon, she stated
that “the nation demarcated by pidgin bore little resemblance to the nation imagined by the Douala elite and
recorded in their print culture.” Ibid., 101.
309
114
See, Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
115
See Tom Nairn, The Breakup of Britain (London: Verso, 1981).
116
Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1961).
117
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1983).
118
Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of
Nationality (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1953).
119
Karl Deutsch failed in the 60s to transform the constraint of the Western rationalist epistemological
framework which had similarly informed his analysis.
120
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(London-New York: Verso, 1983, repr. 1991). Anderson’s work is discussed further below.
121
See Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category
of Bourgeois Society, transl. by Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989).
122
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, Mass: Cambridge
University Press, 1992).
123
Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader.
124
See, for example, Ify Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African
Society (London: Zed Books, 1987), and, Oyeronke Oyewunmi, The Invention of Women: Making an
African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), and
“Conceptualizing Gender: Eurocentric Foundations of Feminist Concepts and the Challenge of African
Epistemologies,” in CODESRIA, African Gender Scholarship: Concepts, Methodologies and Paradigms,
Gender Series, 1, 2004, 1-8. See also, Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, “Yorubas Don’t Do Gender: A Critical Review
of Oyeronke Oyewunmi’s The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender
Discourses,” in CODESRIA: African Gender Scholarship: Concepts, Methodologies and Paradigms.
125
V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (London:
James Curry, 1988).
126
Ali A. Mazrui, Africanity Redefined, edit Ricardo René Laremont et al., (Trenton, NJ: Africa World
Press, 2002).
127
Ibid. Mudimbe searched for the epistemological foundation of an African discourse. Earlier works
dealing with this dilemma in African studies include, Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa. The West and the Rest of
Us: White Predators, Black Slavers and the African Elite (New York: Vintage Books, 1975).
128
As indicated above, the problem had been both methodological and epistemological and has been central
to this author’s engagement with the problem of nationalism in Africa since the 80s.
129
For some major works in this tradition see, Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), and Aristide Zolberg, Creating Political Order: the PartyStates of West Africa (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966).
130
Irene Gendzier, Managing Political Change: Social Scientists and the Third World (Boulder, Colorado:
Westview Press, 1985). Gendzier noted the congruence of Political Development theories with a normative
view of domestic policy on one level and on the other with foreign policy. A central tenet of modernization
theory was the strengthening of the state vis-à-vis civil society so that it could successfully carry out the
task of “modernization.” From this perspective flowed the concern for the “orderly” transfer of colonial
institutions to new elites, a dominant pre-occupation especially in the U.S.A. under the auspices of the
Social Science Research Council's Committee on Comparative Politics
131
A. Temu and B. Swai, Historians and Africanist History: A Critique (London: Zed Press, 1981).
132
Both the African “nationalist” (westernized) elite and the African nationalist historian had shared a
common ideological origin in British late Victorian culture.
310
133
In British societies, the growth of industrial capitalism in the 19th and early 20th centuries had led to the
creation of new social classes, viz., the middle class/bourgeoisie with strong links to state power and a new
mass of the dispossessed - the working class – “alienated” from the means of production and state power.
These processes were transforming the terrains of social struggle (class struggles) and led to the articulation
of new ideologies of power between those classes seeking to retain and accumulate class privileges and
those seeking to be inclusive in structures of power. See, Gendzier, Managing Political Change. Colonial
capital and colonial bureaucracy had similarly led to the emergence of new ‘classes’, i.e., what I have
termed ‘social forces’ in my works, and a new public and the processes were similarly conflictual. New
levels of conflicts were added to prevailing ones in African societies. Colonial capital and colonial
administrative structures generated new resources around which people were mobilized. New social
groupings and relations of production were emerging within older but changing social groupings and
patterns of relations, creating what has been identified in my works as the complex, contradictory and
ambiguous processes in these places. British official response to the emergence of a type of modern mass
society in the colonies and the entry of the masses into colonial politics did not seem to involve any bold
imagination; it was not ideologically dissimilar from that which informed their domestic policy, though
with significant variations in the colonies. In British West Africa, mainstream official policy took the form
of a conservative adherence first to indigenous authorities/institutions in ways that constrained their
hitherto democratic potentials; the attempted shift later in the late 30s to mid 40s to accommodate
“modernizing” elements of the new public in structures of power, first in an ad hoc manner, and later as
programmatic agenda from the end of the 40s was also democratically circumscribed as I tried to show later
on in this study.
134
See Irene Gendzier, Managing Political Change.
135
Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986). He has observed that like Orientalism, or the discourse of the
Orient, the discourse of Political Development and Modernization and its derivative discourse, colonial
independence, were more particularly valuable as symbols of bourgeois middleclass/European power over
the masses/colonial subjects than they were veridic discourse about political development/independence.
For exploration of the concept of Orientalism, see Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1978).
136
Raymond William, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1976).
137
Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World.
138
Ibid. See also Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its fragments: Colonial and Post Colonial Histories
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), 3-13.
139
Anderson’s revised work has attempted to address and resolve some of the challenges raised in his
earlier work of the same title. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed.
140
See, Partha Chatterjee, “Whose Imagined Community?,” in Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its
fragments: Colonial and Post Colonial Histories, 3-13.
141
Ibid., 39.
142
Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985).
143
Ibid.
144
Tom Nairn, The Breakup of Britain.
145
Ibid., 348.
146
Ade Ajayi has long noted that the colonial period or colonial intervention was one, albeit important,
force of change in a long history of change and development in African societies. See Jacob A. Ade Ajayi,
“Colonialism: An Episode in African History,” in Colonialism in Africa Volume I, The History and Politics
311
of Colonialism, 1870-1960, eds., L. H. Gann and P. Duignan, 497-509 (London: Cambridge University
Press, 1985).
147
Aspects of these contradictory development and their effect on “group-forming” or “nation-forming” are
explored a little further in chapter two and in subsequent relevant chapters.
148
The latter would involve officialdom's endeavors to reshape their African empires in line with some
conceived notion of “modernity.” The imperial thrust of the last quarter of the 19th century in Africa by
European Powers, especially by France and Britain, was underpinned by the philosophy of a civilizing
mission which aimed at carrying the benefits of 'civilization' to the “backward” nations, the “Peoples
without history.” This view of the colonies and of the imperial mission by the West is epitomized in the
Covenant of the old League of Nations which stipulated that “the well-being and development of people
not yet ready to stand by themselves form the sacred trust of civilization.” The problem with this
conception of empire revolves around the notion of civilization itself - what is the objective criteria for its
measurement, whose civilization and whose modernity? It raises other issues and questions some of which
have already been engaged with in post-modernist discourse and writings. See, for example, Partha
Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse.
149
These contradictions formed an important part of the sum of what Balandier had earlier tried to
conceptualize as “the colonial situation.” The “colonial situation” represents his attempt to capture
conceptually the whole complex of social, political, economic and other array of phenomena that typified
colonized societies. See Georges Balandier, “The Colonial Situation: A Theoretical Approach,” in Social
Change, ed. Wallerstein, Immanuel, 34-62 (New York: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 1966).
150
Newer works in African studies since the mid-90s have also started to fill certain gaps in the study of the
nationalist phenomenon and/or of decolonization in Africa in their exploration of specific themes or
localities
151
I plan to further explore some of the themes raised in this study in my post-doctoral works.
152
The partial marginalization of many of them in the colonial system gave a greater degree of autonomy
and ability to formulate dissenting discourse. But it was not altogether cost free. In Northern Nigeria, for
example, many Native Authorities’ clerks refrained from full or partial commitment to dissenting
movements under NEPU because of assured loss of employment, physical beatings, arbitrary
imprisonment, etc. from the Native Authorities to those who did. See, NEPU files, Nigeria Archives,
Kaduna. Even worse, they were denied the opportunity to have a direct impact in the creation of the new
independent African state.
153
See Raymond William’s 1958 essay, “Culture is Ordinary,” in Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy,
Socialism (Verso: London, 1989), 18.
Chapter 2
154
Stephen Jackson reveals, for example, in his study of post-independence Democratic Republic of
Congo, how in the vernacular use of ‘autochthony’ and ‘allochthony’ and in their duality the Hutus and
Tutsis (who originated from Rwanda into the Kiev province) were increasingly constituted as strangers,
referred to as ‘Kanyarwanda’ (Sons of Rwanda’) and lacking entitlements and rights in the Congo. This
has led to series of disturbances. In Kivu province, for example, the ‘autochthon’ groups, such as the
Hunde, Nyanga, and Nande in North Kivu feared that the Hutu (‘allochthons’) ‘infiltration threatens their
demographic majority and constant conflicts and intercommunal violence arose over this in the 1960s and
in 1992-93.
155
Chinua Achebe brings a brilliant and humorous exposition from a literary and different perspective to
Africans’ (Ibos) perceptions of the present in the past. See, Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York:
Anchor Books, 1989).
312
156
The British sought to maintain “order and good government” in the name of tradition, hoping colonials
would obey their traditional rulers, hoping workers would desist from going on strike by listening to the
restraining order of their 'chiefs' as they were believed to do in indigenous authority systems. Terence
Ranger provides insightful critique of how Europeans sought to make use of invented tradition to transform
and modernize African thought systems and ways. See Terence Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition in
Colonial Africa” in The Invention of Tradition, 211-262, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
157
Tradition as construed by all interested parties in colonial West Africa became in part a further source of
contradictions. The attempt by its would-be inventors to apply it in static terms also became a source of
conflicts and part of the problem as tradition itself was not static in that pre-colonial structures and norms
were themselves always in process of negotiation and renegotiation. The people rose in opposition time
and time again, as seen in many instances in the Sierra Leone hinterland and in the Gold Coast, for
example, against the practices of their chiefs which they perceived as undemocratic and as having no legal
sanction, be it under local African 'customary law' or western law. For a good account of the operation of
the judicial system in one colony see, Adewoye Omoniyi, The Judicial System in Southern Nigeria, 1854–
1954 (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1977). In Nigeria, in the southern provinces for example, opposition
to the perceived illegitimate and tyrannical rule of Oba Alake Ademola, the colonial chief, in Abeokuta was
rife throughout his three-decade long rule from the 1920s, culminating in the renowned Abeokuta Women's
Movement (AWU) led by Funlayo Ransome (later Anikulapo) Kuti in the post Word War II period.
158
Studies have shown how colonial chiefs were applying tradition to legitimize their rule and practices and
to stake their self-interested claims in the new order. Under British administration, a process of role
modification was occurring in the overall changes brought about in which access to roles was being
provided on grounds other than ‘traditional’ ones while at the same time legitimacy was being conferred on
these in the name of tradition.. Chapters four and subsequent chapters explore the AWU movement.
159
It was already coming under assault with the introduction of the new cash crop economy. As far back as
1903, the Bale of Ibadan was noted to be complaining that hundreds of young men had left Ibadan "without
authority ... to proceed to the coast to better themselves." See Sara Berry, Cocoa, Custom and SocioEconomic Change in Rural Western Nigeria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
160
The British had instituted this form of rule in many of these colonies early in other to rationalize
colonial administration and to foster legitimacy. They combined this with direct governance through
Western-type Parliamentary institutions and which created further problems and discrepancies, i.e.,
mutually divergent forms of rule in one colony.
161
David Apter, Ghana in Transition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).
162
Sara Berry in her study of cocoa producing regions of Western Nigeria succeeded in revealing how
lineage structures were being strengthened. See Sara Berry, Cocoa, Custom and Socio-Economic Change
in Rural Western Nigeria. Trade and commerce, missionary establishments and western education, among
others, were all also contributory to the development of contradictions and to the promotion of tension in
the emergent society under study.
163
Earlier works of economic historians and anthropologists such as Claude Meillasoux and Henry
Bernstein have shown how merchant capital penetrated pre-capitalist circuit of production and consumption
without initially transforming the social relations of production. They showed how the logic of capitalist
production, that is, the appropriation and realization of surplus-value and the accumulation of capital, coexisted with that of simple production, that which revolves around subsistence (Marx C. M. C. Commodity-Money-Commodity) and that of merchant capital with that of productive capital. See, for
example, Claude Meillasoux, “The Social Organization of the Peasantry: The Economic Basis of Kinship,”
Journal of Peasant Studies, no. 1 (1973-74), and Henry Bernstein, “Notes on Capital and Peasantry,”
Review of African Political Economy, no. 10 (1977). See also Sara Berry’s work on Gold Coast cocoa
farming, Sara Berry, Cocoa, Custom and Socio-Economic Change in Rural Western Nigeria.
164
See Henry Bernstein, “Notes on Capital and Peasantry.” Commodity relations were incorporated into
the reproduction cycle of the peasant household. By maintaining pre-capitalist organizations in this way
for as long as possible capital was also able to cheaply reproduce the labor force. Capital attempted to
313
regulate the conditions of pre-capitalist (peasant) production as well as exchange without undertaking its
direct organization. Except in few cases, the peasant household continued to produce use-value
(agricultural and non-agricultural) for its direct consumption alongside with its production of commodities.
165
The introduction of estate agriculture or mining industries were also slowly impacting social relations of
production in the countryside but the penetration of capital there was quite sporadic and furthered the
uneven and contradictory developments in these places.
166
David Apter, Ghana in Transition.
167
Thomas Hodgkin, Nationalism in Colonial Africa.
168
Accompanying these new developments was also the beginning of a stratification system based on
economic/”class” even while previously traditionally defined roles and criteria such as age still retained
certain significance.
169
The problem of definition is tied to the problem of the paradigm that is applied to the understanding of
these social and economic types in Africa and in other such societies. This has been a problem that
scholars, theorists and philosophers of these other societies where capitalism was a later development have
had to contend with over time. Even Karl Marx could not escape the challenge of how to fit other modes of
production and social systems into his grand schema, hence his concept of the Asiatic mode of production.
The implication of these differences for successful world revolution was brought up by contending fellow
leftwing theorists and activists like Rosa Luxemburgh, and the Russian and European Left. Marx conceded
the differences and a possible alternative route to capitalism and socialism with his notion of Asiatic mode
of production.
170
Sara Berry reveals in her study of African wealthy cocoa farmers and traders how much of their earnings
are invested in providing western education for their children. See Sara Berry. Fathers Work for their
Children.
171
Scholars of the African rural hinterland, for example, have debated the use of the term peasantry to
African farmers where in many cases land was not totally alienated, where farmers grew for the market as
well as for subsistence, and where the social organization of production was still rooted significantly in the
pre-capitalist structure of production (although this pattern was more rapidly changing in certain areas as in
some areas of cocoa farming or estate agriculture). Hence, Lloyd Fallers applied the term “protopeasant,”
Eric Wolf “rural cultivator,” Polly Hill “rural capitalist,” and J. Fitchin “commercial farmers',” for
example.171 See Lloyd Fallers, "Are African Cultivators to be called 'Peasants?" Current Anthropology, II
(1961), and “Equality, Modernity and Democracy in the New States,” in Old Societies and New States, ed.
Clifford Geertz (New York: The Free Press, 1963), Eric Wolf, Peasants, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall,
1966), Polly Hill, Studies in Rural Capitalism in West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1970), and J. Fitchin, “Peasantry as a Social Type,” in Symposium: Patterns of Land Utilization and Other
Papers, ed. Viola E. Garfield (Seattle: American Ethnological Society, 1961). Such debates have also been
carried on for the African worker where workers' labor power had not been totally alienated and where
workers were also farmers/peasants, for example. V.L. Allen, for example, had observed much earlier in
relation to the migrant labor phenomenon that the consequence of labor migration had been that the
majority of wage laborers have also been peasant producers, see V.L. Allen, “The Meaning of the Working
Class in Africa,” Journal of Modern African Studies 10, no. 2 (July, 1972): 169-189.
172
The ideology of the age grading societies in modified forms provided an important instrument of
mobilization among the young men. For example, the traditional Asafo organization of young men in the
Gold Coast continued to maintain its viability in this transformed context, asserting the claims and interests
of their young and aspiring members against the encroachment of the colonial chiefs and new power
holders on their own social and economic power base. For an examination of the Asafo movement during
this period, see, Simenson, Jarle. “Rural Mass Action in the Context of Anti-colonial Protest: The Asafo
Movement of Akim Abuakwa, Ghana,” Conference Paper, African Studies Association of the United States
and Canada, November, 1972.
314
173
Cooperatives such as salary earners cooperative, thrift and loan societies, cocoa sales societies and
unions, etc., were being formed in many places, patterned initially in some ways along indigenous forms of
cooperatives. In Nigeria, about 115 of such were recorded by 1940
174
Thomas Hodgkin, Nationalism in Colonial Africa.
175
For example, Hodgkin, Apter and others, have successfully detailed out these new organizational forms
representing new interest groups and in fact went as far as mentioning how some were adapted from older
forms but they failed to point to the conflicts in the values that sustained these and the implication of this
conflict for colonials’ political practice. See, Thomas Hodgkin, Nationalism in Colonial Africa, and
Richard Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties: Power in an Emergent African Nation.
176
Rhoda Howard noted in her study of the Gold Coast Cocoa crises of the 1930s that debt relationship
provided the dynamic in stratifying the peasantry because private property in land was incomplete. Rhoda
Howard, “Formation and Stratification of the Peasantry in Colonial Ghana,” Journal of Peasant Studies 8,
no. 1 (October 1980): 61-81.
177
These movements are examined a little further below.
178
The “nation” would be contested and conceived in similar terms in the post-World War II period.
179
This is a vulgarized form of the English language.
180
The multiplicity of wage earners’ location and their ambiguous characteristics could be and were indeed
actualized in different directions.
181
Many were, however, dependent on the wages of workers and were therefore also impacted by issues
pertaining to workers’ wages, as well as to increased cost of living.
182
See, for example, the account of this strike by Ibrahim Abdullah, “Rethinking the Freetown Crowd: The
Moral Economy of the 1919 Strikes and Riot in Sierra Leone,” in CIAS/RCEA 28, no. 2 (1994).
183
This presents a complex picture and points to the fact that any analysis of workers activism, particularly
in context of the process that ended in decolonization, has to look as much beyond the hidden abode of
production as within it.
184
Ibrahim Abdullah, “Rethinking the Freetown Crowd: The Moral Economy of the 1919 Strikes and Riot
in Sierra Leone,” and, “The Colonial State, Mining Capital and Wage Labor in Sierra Leone, 1884-1945: A
Study in Class Formation and Action,” Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1990.
185
They interacted freely in shared social setting and discussed prevailing economic and social conditions.
Ibrahim Abdullah, “Rethinking the Freetown Crowd,” 211.
186
This is because the activities of wage earners during this period indeed appear to reveal overt concerns
with immediate occupational and economic issues. These ranged from reaction to declining real incomes
to protests against poor housing and labor conditions, particularly among mine workers, and to the general
nature of their incorporation into the 'capitalist' mode of production.
187
This was well ahead of official initiative in this endeavor. It had first involved the adaptation, among
manual workers, of organizations such as the workers' guilds or craft organizations which in the precolonial
times had served to advance artisan workers' interest. The colonial worker sought to convert these to serve
new interests as the nature of work was becoming transformed in the emergent colonial capitalist order.
188
Beyioku Papers, University of Ibadan Library, Nigeria.
189
Workers were divided vertically in terms of their occupation, for example, into clerical and manual
workers which were further subdivided into clerical assistant and executive officer and into skilled and
semi-skilled and unskilled categories, respectively. Horizontally, workers were divided in relation to age,
sex and ethnic origins, for example. In some cases, the horizontal and vertical lines of division coincided.
In the Gold Coast, in the first two decades of the 20th century, especially when labor supply was relatively
scarce, the unskilled and lowest paid workers in the mines and on the railway/harbor establishments also
happened to be migrant workers from the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, from neighboring French
West Africa and from Northern Nigeria. This potential division would become politically significant in the
315
postwar period. It would influence the decision to participate or not participate in strike actions and social
protest activities. In many other cases, however, horizontal and vertical lines criss-crossed.
190
Even among the radical fringe, certain inherent contradictions and other difficulties remained
insurmountable even when these sought to forge workers into a cohesive force as revealed in the case of the
labor left in Nigeria and the Gold Coast.
191
Michael Imoudu led the 1945 strike in Nigeria for increased wages, and was popularly known as Labor
Leader Number One. He was deported on account of his participation in the strike as a “potential threat to
public safety.” See Wale Oyemakinde, “Michael Imoudu and the Emergence of Militant Trade Unionism
in Nigeria, 1940-42,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 7, no. 1 (December, 1974): 541-561.
Other valuable references on Imoudu can be found in Robin Cohen, “Nigeria’s Labour Leader No.1. Notes
for a Biographical Study of M. A. O. Imoudu,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 5, no. 2 (June,
1970): 303-308, Wogu Ananaba, The Trade Union Movement in Nigeria (Apapa, Lagos: Times Press
Limited, 1969), and Richard Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1963). In my interview with Michael Imoudu, conducted in Lagos, August 1990, he lamented what
he perceived to be the demise of the labor movement in Nigeria.
192
Author’s interview with Michael Imoudu, Lagos, Nigeria, 1991.
193
Chapters three, seven and eight explore colonial officials’ fear of these categories of workers with a
labor-socialist orientation.
194
The Gold Coast Railway African Employees Union became one of the first unions to be accorded legal
recognition under the 1941 Trade Union Ordinance and had since been the leader in militant trade
unionism. Their militancy and heightened consciousness partly explains their strategic roles in post-World
War II Gold Coast politics, such as the January 1949 Positive Action. For a well-written account of the
Sekondi Takoradi workers, see, Richard Jeffries, Class, Power, and Ideology in Ghana: the Railwaymen of
Sekondi Takoradi (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
195
See discussion of this aspect in chapter three and in relevant subsequent chapters.
196
As Fred Cooper noted, it was in fact colonial officials who wanted to forge them into a working class in
the 40s. Fred Cooper, Struggles for the City: Migrant Labor, Capital, and the State in Urban Africa
(Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1983).
197
The multiplicity of location among workers also produced its own tension, pulling in opposite directions
and leaving uncertain what each worker or clusters of worker would do in any given situation; it could
pattern their political behavior in quite complex and contradictory ways. How this tension is resolved for
any individual worker or group of workers was determined as much by factors external to the workplace as
by those issuing from it. For example, the geographical division among workers, in terms of their place of
origin could become actualized to serve certain interests that may not necessarily be conducive to particular
workers’ interests or to the creation of a multi-ethnic community.
198
In 1961 the NCNC changed its name to National Convention of Nigerian Citizens.
199
The Yorubas in the Western Region, Hausa-Fulanis in the Northern Region, and the Ibos in the Eastern
Region comprised the three major nationality groupings in Nigeria with other minorities groups in each
region. The three regions have since been divided into over thirty states to better reflect the ‘nationality’
groupings in the country.
200
Aspects of this are revealed in chapter six.
201
Chapter five discusses this shift in Azikiwe’s and NCNC’s position on regionalism.
202
A few and more ideologically-oriented Yoruba workers, like Kola Balogun, however, remained in the
NCNC, perceiving it as a more popularly-based party.
203
This practice is discussed more fully in chapter six.
204
Where one form seemed dominant in a particular struggle, other forms were latent and may become
centered in the same struggle at different moments, as participants perceived their interest
316
205
The struggles were fought at different levels. At one level, it appeared that there were particular interest
groups coalescing around clearly defined issues such as workers fighting for increased wages and better
conditions of work, displaced chiefs fighting for restoration of old privileges and positions, and women
fighting for free and fair access to the market and a say in the running of society. At other significant
levels, however, the conflicts of interests and struggles were more diffused
206
This is revealed, for example, in the Gold Coast Cocoa Movements of the 1930s, and is explored below.
207
While colonialism reinforced patriarchy in many ways, it had also, initially, provided means by which
women were able to seek justice and obtain divorce through the courts. The women took advantage of this
provision to obtain divorce whenever they felt it was necessary, a provision deeply resented by men.
208
“Petition to the Chief Commissioner, Southern Provinces, Enugu, through The Omo N'Oba N'Edo,
Akenzua 11, Uku-Akpolokpolor, Benin City,” from representatives of the Benin Community, Benin City,
January 22nd, 1936, Herbert Macauley Papers, University of Ibadan Library, Nigeria.
209
Gold Coast Legislative Council Debates, 1930.
210
The same internal divisions and conflicting interests are revealed in other social movements examined in
this study, such as the Abeokuta Women’s Union movement examined in later chapters.
211
“Petition of Councilors, Chiefs, and People of Benin City in the Protectorate of Nigeria, to His
Excellency The Governor of Nigeria and President of the Legislative Council of Nigeria, & The Honorable
Members of the Legislative Council of Nigeria,” 21st February, 1938, Benin City, 4, Herbert Macauley
Papers.
212
Ibid. See more in-depth analysis of this movement below.
213
See, for example, Sam Rhodie, “The Gold Coast Cocoa Hold-Up of 1930-31,” Transactions of the
Historical Society of Ghana, 9 (1968): 109.
214
See, Yao Twumasi, “Aspects of Politics in Ghana 1929-1939: a study in the relationships between
discontent and the development of nationalism,” Doctoral dissertation, Oxford, 1971, and Sam Rhodie,
“The Gold Coast Cocoa Hold-Up of 1930-31.”
215
See “The Benin Water Rate Controversy,” in Herbert Macauley Papers.
216
The NYM originated in Lagos among western educated Southerners and sought to democratize the base
of government The NYM’s politics was such that the power of indigenous power holders, including the
colonial chiefs, would be highly reduced.
217
The power base of the Oba was retained in the administrative changes while theirs was reduced.
218
The Benin Movement is further explored below.
219
For more detailed discussion of this uprising see, J. A. Atanda, “The Iseyin-Okeiho Rising of 1916: An
example of Socio-Political Conflict in Colonial Nigeria,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 4, no.
4 (June 1969): 497-514.
220
For a detailed and valuable account of this movement see, R.L. Stone, “Colonial Administration and
Rural Politics in South-Central Ghana, 1919-1951,” Doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1974.
221
Ibid.
222
Ibid.
223
Ibid. He also expressed the fear that “unless the activities of the society are checked immediately the
country will be thrown into helpless confusion before long.”
224
Certain interests became displaced and others reinstated in ways some of the participants themselves did
not expect as the struggle continued and changed over time.
225
See, “Petition to His Excellency, The Governor of Nigeria through the Chief Secretary to the
Government, Lagos, Nigeria, from Councilors, Chiefs and People of Benin City, Benin City,” 21st
February, 1938. See also, “Editorial,” West African Pilot, January 11th, 1938, 4. The levy was to subsidize
317
the cost of operating the new Benin water scheme which was completed by the government on July 16,
1935. This amount, however, happened to be twice the average amount levied elsewhere in Southern
Nigeria but the authorities felt justified in doing this for purposes of reducing the large deficit in the Benin
municipality budget. Here, as in many other instances, the government failed to make its case known and
to gain the support of the people who now felt that the proposed levy was onerous and unfair, thus
incurring the disenchantment of the tax paying population.
226
“Petition to the Chief Commissioner, Southern Provinces, Enugu, through The Omo N'Oba N'Edo,
Akenzua 11, Uku-Akpolokpolor, Benin City, from representatives of the Benin Community, Benin City.”
January 22nd, 1936, 3.
227
Traditionally, as leader of the Eghaevbo n'ore chiefs, the Iyase always identified himself with the
opposition where there were genuine grievances, a role he seemed repeated to play in this renewed context.
228
Of the reported 250 signatories to the mammoth petition of 22 September 1937 representing all sections
of the Benin City, there were 8 councilors, 13 titled chiefs, 1 warrant chief, 32 traders, 131 farmers,
agriculturists or planters, 7 rubber contractors, 29 artisans, 1 washerman, 1 road overseer, 1 sawyer, 5
tailors, 1 book-seller, 2 store keepers, 2 transport owners, 2 pensioners, 1 clerk, 1 domestic servant and 7
unclassified signatories, Benin Prof. 929, Vol.1, p.40, cited in Philip A. Igbafe, “The Benin Water Rate
Agitation 1937-1939: An Example of Social Conflict,” Journal of Historical Society of Nigeria 4, no. 3
(December, 1968): 360.
229
“Petition to The Chief Commissioner, Southern Provinces,” 3.
230
Ibid, 4.
231
“Petition to His Excellency, The Governor of Nigeria, for and on behalf of the Benin Community by the
Iyasere, Prime Minister, Chief Ojomo, Chief Oshodin and Chief Iyamu, the Obazuwa of Benin,” 21st
February, 1938, Herbert Macauley Papers, 1.
232
It is not clear, however, how the calculation was made to result in this amount which is much lower than
6% reduction of the original amount. It appears that there was a typographical error in the document and
‘6%’ should have read ‘60%’ instead.
233
“Petition to His Excellency, The Governor of Nigeria.”
234
Ibid.
235
This reorganization had involved the abolition of the District Head system in 1935, their erstwhile
power base.
236
Philip, A. Igbafe, “The Benin Water Rate Agitation 1937-1939: An Example of Social Conflict,” 60.
237
The six members of the Intelligence Report Committee of the Benin Community comprised: 1. Y. O.
Eke - President, literate, trader; 2. H. O. Uwaifo - Secretary, old student King's College, Lagos, ex-2nd
class clerk; 3. E. E. Omere - Assistant Secretary, attended Benin City Government School, ex-2nd class
clerk, trader and timber exporter; 4. H. O. Amadasu - literate, trader; 5. Jacob U. Egharevba - historian,
author of A Short History of Benin; 6. Y. O. Okunzuwa -ex-student, Benin City government school, trader,
cited in Igbafe, “The Benin Water Rate Agitation 1937-1939,” 364.
238
This was in spite of the claims of H.O. Uwaifo, one of the members of the Committee, to the effect that
the Intelligence Report received the support of “titled chiefs who are not councilors as well as the general
people.” Their recommendation was not well received either by the general body of the Benin Community
which had selected them for this exercise. See the report in Igbafe, “The Benin Water Rate Agitation 19371939,” 365.
239
“Petition by the Ekhaekpen Chiefs of Benin to the Oba,” 24.6.38, BP. 835, 50.
240
Ibid.
241
Cited in Igbafe, “The Benin Water Rate Agitation 1937-1939.”
242
Ibid.
318
243
Chief Secretary's Office (CSO), Lagos, 26: 33603, p. 123., cited in Igbafe, “The Benin Water Rate
Agitation 1937-1939,” 371
244
Ibid.
245
Ibid.
246
Ibid.
247
The changing nature of local politics is examined further in chapter six.
248
See discussion of this in chapters five and eight.
249
The struggles were tied to the way in which wealth was accumulated in the private sphere.
250
Sam Rhodie comes closest in his analysis of the movement as ‘evidence of social conflict.’ Yao
Twumasi’s account is also detailed and insightful and his and Rhoda Howard’s studies draw attention to the
incipient class formation in this industry. For some of these studies, see, Sam Rhodie, “The Gold Coast
Cocoa Hold-up of 19930-31,” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, I0 (1968): 105-118, Yao
Twumasi, “Aspects of Politics in Ghana 1929-1939: A study in the relationships between discontent and
the development of nationalism,” Doctoral dissertation, Oxford University, 1971, and Rhoda Howard,
“Formation and Stratification of the Peasantry in Colonial Ghana,” Journal of Peasant Studies 8, no. 1
(October 1980): 61-81, and Josephine Milburn, “The 1938 Gold Coast Cocoa Crisis: British Business and
the Colonial Office,” African Historical Studies 3, no. 1 (1970): 57-74.
251
Rich farmer, money lenders, rural cocoa brokers, rich peasants, and chiefs oftentimes all combined into
one. Howard rightly noted that ‘sometimes, broker, money lender and chiefs, were all the same person.’
Rhoda Howard, “Formation and Stratification of the Peasantry in Colonial Ghana,’ 75.
252
These had before then engaged in speculation and had hoarded large stocks of cocoa produce as a result
of previous rising prices in cocoa in the 1920s, and again between 1932, after the first Gold Coast Cocoa
hold-up, and 1936. Between 1936 and 1937, the price of Gold Coast cocoa was reported to have reached
an all-time high. But the world demand for cocoa declined and sales and prices dropped very sharply
during 1937. The foreign companies involved in this trade, in their efforts to withstand this decline and to
offset their losses, had joined together to form Cocoa Pools which was a form of monopsony. Their action
further compromised the ability of Africans engaged in this industry to survive the decline successfully. In
reaction to this, they organized against the big firms and government to stop the sale of cocoa from its
source.
253
Legislative Council Debates, Gold Coast, 19 June 1930, p.318. Nana Ofori Atta, the colonial chief,
would ask during question time in the Gold Coast Legislative Council whether the Director of Agriculture
took any interest in regard to the manipulation of the cocoa markets in Europe and America and whether he
had any scheme which might help the farmers in justifiable circumstances to escape undue exploitation.
Legislative Council Debate, Gold Coast, 1932-33.
254
The cocoa farming industry was the mainstay of the Gold Coast economy, apart from mining interests.
For a good discussion of the development of this industry in the Gold Coast, see Sara Berry, Cocoa,
Custom and Socio-Economic Change in Rural Western Nigeria, and Polly Hill, The Gold Coast Cocoa
Farmer: A Preliminary Survey (London: Oxford University Press, 1956).
255
Yao Twumasi, “Aspects of Politics in Ghana 1929-1939: A study in the relationships between
discontent and the development of nationalism.”
256
For a detailed and valuable account of the activities of the chiefs in these ways, see Twumasi, “Aspects
of Politics in Ghana 1929-1939.”
257
Sam Rhodie, “The Gold Coast Cocoa Hold-up of 19930-31.”
258
Ibid., 105.
259
The Vox Populi, 31 January, 1931, cited in Yao Twumasi, “Aspects of Politics in Ghana 1929-1939.”
260
Ibid.
319
261
The potentials to find common identity in apparent common cause were actualized on many occasions
especially from the 1930s onward. On another occasion in the interwar period, in the early 30s in the Gold
Coast, a united opposition was attempted to be built among some chiefs, educated elites, elders and the
masses over government's proposal to introduce an income tax bill in 1931. This was at a time of great
economic distress and the proposals led to major disturbances in different places. The opposition to it
assumed a wide variety of forms, from urban tax riots in Cape Coast, Sekondi and Shama to 'constitutional'
protests in Accra, Axim, Oda and Kumasi to messianic prophetic uprising of the Bensus and to the
traditional Asafo disturbances in Native Authorities in Ashanti and the Cape Coast. See, Yao Twumasi,
“Aspects of Politics in Ghana 1929-1939.”
262
This is explored a little further in chapter 6.
263
Miroslav Hroch revealed this, for example, in his study of nationalist revival among the East European
countries. See, Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe.
264
Ibid.
265
See, for example, my earlier works and the application of the Hrochian concept of the socially-relevant
conflicts of interest and the nationally-relevant conflicts of interests in Nike Adebiyi, “Radical Nationalism
in British West Africa, 1945-56,” unpublished draft of doctoral dissertation, 1994@, and, “Deconstructing
Nationalism: Towards a Social History of the Pre-independence Movements in British West Africa, 19001945,’ Paper presented at the Council for the Development of Economic and Social Research in Africa
(CODESRIA), Methodological Seminar on Social Movements, Social Transformation, and the Struggle for
Democracy in Africa, Algiers, Algeria, July 18-20, 1990.
266
This is explored more fully in chapter seven.
267
I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson is examined in chapter three and later chapters.
268
See chapter three for discussions of West African students in Britain and their links with leftwing
organizations and individuals.
269
See Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain, 1900-1960: Nationalism, Pan Africanism and Communism
(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1998), for a good study of African and Black diasporas’ activism in Britain
and for one of the few studies of communism in relation to Blacks in this period. His account is useful but
is limited to its examination in relation to Africans and Blacks in Britain.
270
Ayodele J. Langley, Pan Africanism and Nationalism in West Africa: A Study in Ideology and Social
Classes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), and Immanuel Geis, The Pan African Movement (London:
Methuen & Co Ltd, 1974) are two well-written account of this movement.
Chapter 3
271
Hakim Adi also noted that “anti-communism, whatever the reality, was a useful and powerful weapon to
be used to label the real threat of anti-colonialism.” See Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain, 1900-1960:
Nationalism, Pan Africanism and Communism, 134.
272
Ibid.
273
The Comintern (Communist International) was the Third International and was established in 1919 on
the success of the 1917 Russian revolution. Its official position, first spelled out by V. I. Lenin, was that
the Third International was the direct and legitimate heir of the First International and that it had taken over
all that was progressive in the Second International and given continuity to Marxist revolutionary
movement. For detailed study of the Revolutionary Internationals, see, for example, Milorad M.
Drachkovitch, ed., The Revolutionary Internationals, 1864-1943 (California: Stanford University Press,
1966).
274
Chapter seven examines the socially relevant intervention of these colonials.
275
Minute by A. Fiddian, June 2, 1932, CO 96/704/1932, PRO.
320
276
“Extremists” and “agitators” were sometimes synonymous with ‘communist’ in officialdom’s parlance.
277
“From Sir Gerald Creasy to The Right Hon. Arthur Creech-Jones, M.P., Secretary of State for the
Colonies,” Secret Telegram CO 537/3558/4220, 22nd March, 1948, PRO.
278
Cummings-John and Ransome-Kuti’s discourses and movements are discussed in chapters four and
seven. Their known early connections to the international leftwing movements, however limited or tenuous,
might have served to facilitate the perception in official mind that these women were ‘communists.’ This
perception was possibly fed further by the actual connection, albeit limited and weak, of their movements
in the colonies at certain periods to certain communist-influenced international revolutionary movements.
See further discussion of this in chapter seven.
279
Other women activists like Mrs. Ekpo of Eastern Nigeria were ridiculed as ‘prostitutes,’ etc.
280
Quoted in Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain, 1900-1960: Nationalism, Pan Africanism and
Communism.
281
NEPU was formed in August 1950 as a breakaway radical organization from the more conservative
Northern Peoples Association (NPA) composed of traditional elites.
282
NEPU Papers, Nigeria Archives, Kaduna, 10.
283
Ibid.
284
See, for example, “Colonial Students: Political Significance,” CO 537/2574, PRO.
285
Outside of WASU, there is no known significant current of radical thoughts or activism solely among
overseas West African students.
286
African trade unions were regarded as one of the most important channels of communist infiltration into
the colonies. For officialdom’s emphasis on workers as significant channels of communist infiltration into
Africa, see for example, Robert D. Baum, “Trade Unionism and Communism in Africa,” in MSS
Brit.Emp.s.365, Fabian Colonial Bureau, Africa, General, 1940-1962, Box 77, file 2, Rhodes House
Library, Oxford, England. Baum was Chief, Africana Branch, Division of Research for Near East, South
Asia, and Africa, in the Department of State, Great Britain.
287
Mentioned in “Minute of O. G. R. Williams to the Secretary of State on Parliamentary Questions and
Significance,” 18.8.38, CO 267/666/32216/1938, PRO.
288
CO 537/4312/14322/5, PRO.
289
CO 537/7618/11246, PRO.
290
CO 537/2637/14322, PRO.
291
Some of the documents are cited as relevant in the following sections and in subsequent chapters.
292
CO 537/2638/14322/2, PRO.
293
CO 537/5263/14298, PRO.
294
This is explored further in subsequent chapters.
295
This was initially along old traditional forms.
296
Report on the Census, 1921, 60, cited in Jon Kraus, “The Political Economy of Industrial Relations in
Ghana,” in Industrial Relations in Africa, eds., Ukandi, G. Damachi, Seibel, H. Dieter and Lester
Trachtman, 112 (London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1979).
297
Ukandi, G. Damachi, Seibel, H. Dieter and Lester Trachtman eds. Industrial Relations in Africa, 3-4.
298
Ibid.
299
See V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers,
1939).
321
300
See, Otto Huiswood Billings, “Report on the Negro Question,” International Press Correspondence 3, 2
(1923): 14-16.
301
For Lenin's work on the national issue see, V. I. Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979). Marx himself did not provide a theory of nationalism. Marx and
Engels were not committed to any abstract principle of freedom. Their position on the national question
was functional, dependent on the extent to which a particular nationalist movement furthered or detracted
from the cause of world revolution. Their support of the Polish national movement against 'feudal' Russia
and their opposition to the national movements in Bohemia, Croatia and Serbia against the developed
German nation was determined by this position.
302
Within its theoretical schema, colonialism is presented as incorporating both the capitalist system of
economic exploitation and the imperialist system of political and economic domination and exploitation.
V. I. Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism attempts the most systematic theoretical
exposition of this theme. Capitalism and imperialism, according to Lenin, manifest the ultimate and dying
stages of a decadent system based on class and national exploitation, respectively.
303
Although it was communist influenced in origin, the LAI embraced other anti-imperialist organizations
which were not necessarily communist-oriented. This at any rate reflected the Comintern's early policy of
working with all anti-colonial forces everywhere. The LAI was representative altogether of three major
anti-colonial forces in the world, viz. communist, leftwing social democrats, and progressive liberal
intellectuals and representatives of national movements in various other colonial territories. These were
united by a common aim of anti-imperialism and support for national movements in the colonies.
304
Among the 173 delegates at the formation of the LAI in 1927 were Leopold Senghor and Jomo Kenyatta
from colonial Africa: Senegal and Kenya. Jomo Kenyatta who became recognized as a prominent leader of
the Mau Mau movement and would later become the first president of independent Kenya was very closely
associated with Communist Russia and the Comintern earlier on. He was known to have taken courses of
study in Russia and was reported at every significant meeting of the Comintern-front organizations for the
colonial world, especially.
305
WASU and its links with the LAI are discussed a liitle further below.
306
The NWA was established in 1931 also in London.
307
Colonial seamen were perceived by the Comintern and its affiliated organizations to be strategically
placed as conduit pipes of communist infiltration into the colonies.
308
The contemporary and important Pan African movement among Africans in the diaspora and African
colonials which was founded in 1900 and reconstituted in the interwar period in 1919 around the same time
as the Third International did not initially provide similar revolutionary stimulus for the timely political
liberation of continental Africa under imperial rule until the infusion of leftwing communist revolutionary
ideologies into it later. Communism's focus on class was to later radicalize the race premise of Pan
Africanism. Garvey's economic nationalism which was influential earlier on was based on race and was,
for example, bold in its conception but its attempt to replace White capitalism with Black capitalism still
left Pan Africanism on a socially conservative premise. For a valuable study of this movement, see
Immanuel Geis. The Pan African Movement (London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1974). See also George
Padmore, ed., History of the Pan-African Congress (London: Hammersmith, 1947), for alternative account
from a radical perspective.
309
George Padmore later renounced his membership of the Communist Party and became an avowed Pan
Africanist. For some insight into the trajectory of his thoughts, see George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or
Communism (New York, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1971). See also DuBois’ comments on
Padmore in W. E. B. DuBois, Africa in Battle Against Colonialism, Racialism, Imperialism (Chicago,
Illinois: Afro-American Heritage Association, 1960).
310
This came twenty years after the last (fourth) session of a Pan African Congress and it seemed to have
resuscitated the movement at this time. This move was largely the work of George Padmore who was also
the moving spirit behind the 1945 Congress. Its proceedings and resolutions which bore a strong MarxistLeninist tone were largely influenced by the Left in this organization and which Padmore symbolized. See
322
Padmore's account of the proceedings in George Padmore, ed. History of the Pan-African Congress:
Colonial and Coloured Unity, a Programme of Action (London: Hammersmith Bookshop, 1963). For work
on the same conference from a different perspective, see Imanuel Geis, The Pan African Movement. Part of
the Congress resolutions and rhetorics called on the workers of the colonies to be “in the forefront of the
battle against imperialism” and for the intellectuals and professional classes to “awaken to their
responsibilities,” suggesting a somewhat Marxist-Leninist position for waging a “class” war. Aspects of
the theoretical weaknesses of Marxism-Leninism in relation to these colonial social formations are
discussed in chapter 7.
311
These had gained direct and indirect exposure to communist revolutionary organizations and doctrines
from the interwar period onward.
312
Chapter seven explores the nature and impact of Marxism-Leninism on colonial social radicals and their
discourse of the nation and notions of citizenship.
313
See “F. G. Guggisberg to the Secretary of State,” Telegram, 5 December 1920, CO 96/617/1920, PRO,
London.
314
Ibid. Colonial seamen were indeed becoming a conduit pipe for the infiltration of communist literature
into the colonies.
315
To note, these students were definitely not a monolithic group.
316
This author’s father, Albert Adedeji Edun, son of the historic Secretary of Egba United Government in
colonial Abeokuta, Adegboyega Edun, was also one of these overseas students in the period but he was not
involved in African students’ political activism.
317
Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain, 1900-1960, 139, 11. He also noted a high level of political activity
among West African students in Edinburgh and London as early as the beginning of the 1900s, and
commented that any critic of British colonialism and in defense of interests of Africans fell foul of the
Colonial Office. .
318
Quoted in Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain, 151-152.
319
CO 537/2573/11020/30 and CO 537/2573/11020/30/1. PRO.
320
Ibid.
321
See, for example, “Committee on Students in the United Kingdom, Proceedings, 1947-1948,” CO
537/2573/11020/30/1, PRO.
322
CO 537/2573/11020/30 & 30/1.
323
Prominent among these were Ministers of Parliament like Fenner Brockway.
324
“Assessment of Anti-Communist Propaganda,” CO 554: 1177, PRO.
325
Ibid.
326
Adi, West Africans in Britain, 130
327
See, “Anti-Communist Propaganda: The Press in the African Colonies,” CO 537/5129, PRO.
328
The WASU is explored in this context at some length below.
329
The hostel was an important site of socialization and fraternization for a cross-section of West African
and other colonial students.
330
Friends House and its student body proved to be of no considerable influence, however. See, Gabriel O.
Olusanya, The West African Students’ Union and the Politics of Decolonization, 1925-1958 (London:
Blackrose Press, 1982).
331
Vischer of the Colonial Office would remark that ‘many Africans and West Indians at present frequent
the society of Communists and go to doubtful places of entertainment.’ Vischer memo, 4 September 1934,
CO 323/1281/31474. PRO.
323
332
See some exploration of aspects of this in chapter seven.
333
This was where the socially radical political organization, NEPU, was operative. Aminu Kano was
made the life patron of NEPU.
334
Alan Feinstein, African Revolutionary: The Life and Times of Nigeria’s Aminu Kano (New York, New
York: The New York Times Book Co, 1973).
335
Ibid., 99.
336
Ibid.
337
Ibid.
338
Ibid., 104.
339
Malam Sa’adu Zungur was a Hausa, born into a learned family, and was schooled in both English and
Arabic. He is revered as an inspirational critic of the system of emirate rule. He was a Koranic scholar and
also trained as a medical dispenser. In 1943-44, one of the most important early societies in the North – the
Bauchi General Improvement Union - was established largely through Zungur’s efforts. He was Federal
Secretary of the NCNC from 1948 to 1951 and in 1949, he accompanied Azikiwe to Europe and attended
with him a meeting of the Council of Peoples Against Imperialism, a group led by Hon. Fenner Brockway,
M.P., in 1949. Zungur was a very strong influence on Aminu Kano and also very influential in NEPU. He
died in 1958 after a lingering illness.
340
Samuel Ladoke Akintola was born in July, 1910 in Ogbomosho, Western Provinces of Nigeria. He was
called to the bar in London in 1949 and returned home in 1950. He became the legal adviser of the Action
Group and a member of the AG National Executive when it was founded. In December 1959, he became
the substantive Premier of the Western Region. In January 15, 1966, he was assassinated in a military
coup.
341
See George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism.
342
Akinjide Osuntokun, Chief S. Ladoke Akintola: His Life and Times (New Jersey: Frank Cass and
Company Limited. 1984), 19.
343
Alan Feinstein. African Revolutionary, 101. George Padmore had in fact left the Communist Movement
in 1934 after refusing to toe the communist party line. One of his fellow Black diasporic revolutionaries,
C. L. R. James, who became a communist late in life, commented that ‘George was concerned with the
revolution, chiefly in regard to Africa; we were concerned with the world revolution ….’ See C. L. R.
James, At the Rendezvous of Victory (London: Allison & Busby, 1984), 257.
344
Akinjide Osuntokun, Chief S. Ladoke Akintola: His Life and Times, 19.
345
With the death of one of its chief founder, Ladipo Solanke in 1958, its influence began to wane
considerably. See G. O. Olusanya, The West African Students’ Union and the Politics of Decolonization,
1925-1958.
346
Solanke was very close to the Ransome-Kutis. Reverend Ransome-Kuti was Funlayo Ransome-Kuti’s
husband and was very supportive of her political activities and goals.
347
Most of the information on WASU in this study is based on WASU’s main publication, the WASU
Magazine, as well as references to WASU in other primary and secondary materials on WASU. G. O.
Olusanya, The West African Students’ Union and the Politics of Decolonization, 1925-1958, provides the
most useful of the secondary materials used on WASU.
348
Dr. Rita Hinden, Lord Farringdon, as well as African leaders in the colonies such as Dr. A. Maja,
president of the NYM, Dr. K. A. Korsah (Gold Coast), Dr. E. Taylor-Cummings (Sierra Leone), and
Reverend I. O. Ransome-Kuti (Nigeria), had been involved at various times with its proceedings. See
Olusanya, The West African Students’ Union and the Politics of Decolonization, 1925-1958.
349
Olusanya, The West African Students’ Union and the Politics of Decolonization, 1925-1958.
350
Ibid.
324
351
Ibid.
352
Efforts were made to interview Brockway on my research trip to London before his subsequent death
but this was not possible as he was no longer available to the public due to old age. The labor left’s
perceived extreme leftwing position had often earned them the consternation of their party executives and
periodic suspension from the party.
353
See, for example, Fenner Brockway, Inside the Left: Thirty Years of Platform, Press, Prison, and
Parliament (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1942), and, Outside The Right (London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1963). See also D. N. Chester and Nona Bowring, Questions in Parliament (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1962).
354
Dr. Norman Leys, “The Responsibility of European Government in Africa,” WASU Magazine, no. 8
(January 1929), 16. He tried to draw analogy with aspects of their own domestic problem as he and other
labor socialists perceived it at the time, saying that, “At the bottom of all our own political problem is the
fact that the workers resent their dependence, as shown by the absence of any influence over the work they
do, so that the only power of choice they have is to take or leave a job when to leave it means relative
starvation for themselves and their families.” Ibid.
355
Ibid.
356
Ibid., 16-17.
357
Reginald Sorensen, M. P., Chairman’s opening speech, WASU Magazine, 5. Sorensen also attended the
first meeting of the New Consultative Committee on the Welfare of Colonial Students in the UK when the
Committee first met in November 1951. It was chaired by Lord Minister, the Parliamentary Under
Secretary of State for the Colonies, and in attendance were also other M.P.s , as well as representatives of
the Colonial Office, etc., and the National Union of Students.
358
Ibid.
359
See chapters four, five and eight for a discussion of this shift in officialdom’s thinking and position.
360
CO 537/5138/96801, PRO.
361
Ibid.
362
WASU had believed the Labor Party was in agreement with these goals before 1945 when the Party was
in the opposition.
363
Davies continued to catalogue the series of disappointments WASU have had with the Colonial Office.
He complained against the off-handed manner the Colonial Secretary’s Office dealt with their requests to
place their views before the Colonial Secretary on the question of the General Strike in Nigeria and the
protests by the cocoa farmers in West Africa against the continuance of wartime controls. H. O. Davies,
‘The Colonial Office and Ourselves,” Annual Report, 1944-45, WASU Magazine 12, no. 2 (March 1945), 8.
364
File in MSS.Afr.s.1527, Rhodes House, Oxford.
365
Ibid. Friends House was the rival West African students’ hostel that the British government had
encouraged in order to undermine WASU and its perceived radicalism.
366
The British Labor Party, like other political parties and organizations, was also composed of people with
different shades of ideological beliefs to that by which they were centrally connected.
367
Perhaps because of WASU’s failure to fully understand the nature of the Fabian socialists’ influence on
it and its real position in regard to certain colonial issues, they were expecting more from the Labor
government than the Labor government was prepared or able to give. The Labor government was not, for
example, prepared to give in to self-government to the colonies when it came to power.
368
For a more in-depth discussion of this aspect of British policy in this period, see Jane Bowden,
“Development and Control in British Colonial Policy: Nigeria and the Gold Coast, 1935-48,” Doctoral
dissertation, University of Birmingham, England, 1980.
325
369
Chapter eight further discusses the Fabians’ and the Labor Party’s predisposition or otherwise towards
the timely grant of full self-determination for British West African colonies.
370
Editorial comment, WASU Magazine, 12 (Autumn 1947). Creech-Jones was the Labor government’s
Secretary of State for the Colonies.
371
It definitely showed the influence of Nkrumah and the inner core of radicals in WASU. There were
varying degrees of radicalization in WASU as some evinced a more leftwing orientation than others.
Nkrumah at this time exhibited the trend among some towards Marxist-style politics.
372
Nkrumah had brought with him all the paraphernalias of radical/revolutionary doctrines and practices
that he had acquired in the course of his many years of living and studying in the United States.
373
Adi, West Africans in Britain, 1900-1960: Nationalism, Pan Africanism and Communism.
374
Ibid.
375
Ibid.
376
Ibid., 152.
377
Ibid.
378
Ibid.
379
Ibid.
380
This was reflected in his comment to James Ford in regard to the copies of the Negro Worker that Ford
had forwarded to him.
381
Cited in Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain, 1900-1960: Nationalism, Pan Africanism and
Communism.
382
Ibid., 162-163.
383
Ibid.
384
Ibid.
385
Workers in strategic industries in the colonies were also most suspect by colonial officials.
386
The years 1922-29 were years of economic progress but by the end of 1929, prices collapsed and
worldwide depression set in. As prices rose dramatically in the early war years, the number of strikes and
union organizing also increased significantly during 1939-41.
387
Legislative Council Debates, Gold Coast, “Report of a Select Committee of the Legislative Council to
Consider the Provisions of the Regulations of Employment Bill,” Sessional Paper II, 1920-21, 4.
388
“Labour Conditions,” Report of the Labour Department, 1938-39, 12, cited in Jon Kraus, “The Political
Economy of Industrial Relations in Ghana,” in Industrial Relations in Africa, edits. Ukandi Damachie, H.
Dieter, Lester Trachtman, 113.
389
Ibid.
390
British officialdom saw conflict and protests in the colonies as dysfunctional to the body politic.
391
Jon Kraus, “The Political Economy of Industrial Relations in Ghana,” 114.
392
The harbors and railway center of Sekondi-Takoradi located in the Western region of the Gold Coast
was the hub of the export trade in gold, timber, and cocoa and headquarters of many unions, including the
Gold Coast Trade Union Council. For a well-written account of the railway workers in Sekondi-Takoradi,
see, Richard Jeffries. Class, Power, and Ideology in Ghana: the Railwaymen of Sekondi-Takoradi
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
393
“Assessment of Anti-Communist Propaganda,” Political Development: Gold Coast, CO 554/1177, PRO.
394
V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
326
395
See, for example, “Appeal to the Negro Seamen and Dockers” by The International of Seamen and
Harbor Workers, Negro Worker 2, no. 4 (April 1932).
396
Ibid.
397
Ibid.
398
The Third International or the Comintern, predicated on Marxist-Leninist doctrines, became the central
instrument through which Communist ideas and visions of change were attempted to be spread
internationally, especially among colonials in Africa, Asia, and the African diaspora in the United States
and Britain. There were other and contesting revolutionary schools of thought and positions to that
embodied in the Comintern such as the Zimmerwald Majority or the Vienna Union which represented
alternative space for the construction of socialist and democratic programs.
399
West Africa, August 25, 1962, 935.
400
Chapter seven explores this issue a little further.
401
He was removed from the scene in the colony of Sierra Leone and imprisoned during the entire period
of World War II hostilities.
402
Isaac Theophilus Akunna (I. T. A.) Wallace-Johnson, a Creole from Wilberforce Village, near
Freetown, Sierra Leone, was born in the early 1890s.
403
The WAYL was founded by Wallace-Johnson in 1938. It provided a loose framework to bring together
workers in the city, addressed workers’ concern as well as broad-based issues of social concerns, and
attempted to radicalize the urban and rural masses. The WAYL spread quickly at its formation and claimed
over 42,000 members by the end of its first year, according to LaRay Denzer. See, LaRay Denzer, “The
Influence of Pan-Africanism in the Political Career of Constance A. Cummings-John.”
404
British officialdom was uncomfortable with the presence of Wallace-Johnson (or other perceived
radicals like him) in Britain. His leadership of the Sierra Leone trade union, his West African colony-wide
organization, the West African Youth League (WAYL), his protest activities, and his travels abroad and
believed contact with communist-organizations and leftwing-oriented individuals in Great Britain, etc.,
unnerved officials.
405
Denzer noted that he had gone there for further studies in ‘Political and Natural Sciences as well as to
have a clear insight of educational work in the Soviet Republics,’ etc. See LaRay Denzer, “I. T. A. Wallace
Johnson and the West African Youth League: A Case Study in West African Nationalism,” unpublished
Doctoral dissertation, University of Birmingham, 1974.
406
This was the comment of the Gold Coast Governor, Gerald Creasy, regarding the presence of Wallace
Johnson in that colony where he had gone to in 1933. Minute by Gerald Creasy, 27th February, 1936, CO
96/731/31230, PRO.
407
There were innumerable official memos on Wallace-Johnson, as revealed in the Colonial Office files in
the British Archive. Even when he did not say anything, that was also recorded!
408
LaRay Denzer. “I. T. A. Wallace Johnson and the West African Youth League: A Case Study in West
African Nationalism.”
409
His oppositional discourse of imperialism was beginning to sound left of the ideological center, although
important components of it also issued from Western liberal discourse.
410
Negro Worker, 7-8 (September -October 1937) and, Negro Worker 7, no. 3 (March 1937). This theme
would resonate among other Africans in the colonies in the post World War II period.
411
Ibid. This discourse of freedom was also privileged by colonial subjects in London who were organized
in the League of Abyssinia opposed to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.
412
While Africans in the colonies’ Legislative Councils, made up of chiefs, conservatives, and a handful of
westernized Africans, as well as whites, were enthusiastically voting funds from the colonies’ resources to
support the war efforts, select colonial radicals like Wallace Johnson were opposed to the war and to the
colonies' support of Britain in the war.
327
413
Negro Worker, 7-8 (September -October 1937) and 7, no. 3 (March 1937).
414
They had created the WAYL in the Gold Coast in 1934 with Wallace-Johnson, together with other antiimperialists like Ellis Brown of the Gold Coast.
415
J. M. Lonsdale, “Some Origins of Nationalism in East Africa,” Journal of African History 9, no. 1
(1968).
416
Denzer commented that the WAYL’s main objective was to create a united front movement to save the
country ‘from the disastrous effect of capitalist exploitation and imperialist oppression’ and work towards
‘a standard of living worthy of humanity.’ LaRay Denzer, “The Influence of Pan-Africanism in the
Political Career of Constance A. Cummings-John.”
417
Mr. Paling to the Secretary of State, Mr. Malcolm McDonald, Oral Answers, House of Commons, in CO
267/687/32303/2, PRO. The Secretary of State, however, replied that his detention was related to the
documents found in his possession to which Paling retorted: ‘Is it not the fact that these documents show
crimes of a very trivial character, and do not warrant his detention?’ Ibid.
418
Judge Advocate Summing up before Court Martial, 8 May, 1939, CO 267/671/32216/1, PRO.
419
For such questions, see, D. N. Chester and Nona Bowring, Questions in Parliament.
420
Minute by O.G.R. Williams on Parliamentary Questions and Significance, 18/8/38, CO 267/666/32216,
1938, PRO.
421
With the outbreak of World War II and the declaration of Freetown as a defended port, the state moved
to disband the WAYL at the end of the 30s and to arrest Wallace-Johnson and other leaders of the WAYL.
Wallace-Johnson’s discourses would resonate in important ways among colonial radicals and the later
Wallace-Johnson in the legislature in the post-World War II radical ferment.
422
Telegram from the Secretary of State for the Colonies to the Governor of Sierra Leone, 27 June, 1939, in
file titled “I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson, Colonial Office Correspondence,” MSS.Afr.s.1527, Rhodes House,
Oxford.
423
Ibid.
424
O. G. R. Williams, secret letter to H. R. R. Blood, 16 Nov. 1939, CO 267/687/32303/2, PRO, London.
425
Denzer, based on her interview with Sydney Boyle, would go as far as regarding the WAYL’s most
important contribution to be the introduction of Marxist-Leninist ideas and organizational tactics, however
imperfectly understood. See, LaRay Denzer, “The Influence of Pan-Africanism in the Political Career of
Constance A. Cummings-John.” She also mentioned that Wallace-Johnson might have been a card carrying
communist at one time but that this could not be validated. See, LaRay Denzer, “I. T. A. Wallace Johnson
and the West African Youth League: A Case Study in West African Nationalism.”
426
Abdullah also contended that “within a short period the working class was able, through the framework
of the League, to make its presence felt.” See Ibrahim Abdullah, “The Colonial State, Mining Capital and
Wage Labor in Sierra Leone, 1884-1945: A Study in Class Formation and Action,” Doctoral dissertation,
University of Toronto, 1990, 224, 8.
427
This critique of communism and leftwing politics and discourse is further elaborated in chapter seven.
428
Apart from the theoretical weakness of communism, the organs of communism were divided in
themselves and the importance of the Third World/colonies were subject to the vagaries and fortunes of
communism in the Western world in the period under study. The Communist International abandoned its
support for the colonies during this period of rapprochement with the West in the late 1930s Popular Front
Alliance.
429
John D. Hargreaves, “Assumptions, Expectations, and Plans: Approaches to Decolonization in Sierra
Leone,” in Decolonization and After, eds. W. H. Morris-Jones and Dennis Austin, 84 (London: Frank Cass,
1980).
430
See further discussion of these limits and challenges in chapter seven.
328
431
This is discussed more fully in author’s critique of radicalism and of social radicals in chapter seven.
432
He also revealed the difficulties for many colonial radicals of resolving the internal contradictions
inherent in many radical/leftwing thoughts.
433
LaRay Denzer, “I. T. A. Wallace Johnson and the West African Youth League: A Case Study in West
African Nationalism.” For a description of this rebellion, see Martin Kilson, Political Change in a West
African State, A Study of the Modernization Process in Sierra Leone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 11023.
434
He however succeeded in entering the Sierra Leone Legislative Council in the 50s as an Independent
and continued to be an advocate for social change within this institution as revealed in chapter seven.
435
The Secretary of State had subsequently affirmed the Governor of Sierra Leone’s decision to deport
Wallace-Johnson. Part of the charges in the Deportation Ordinance on which he was interred read: “That
you are an undesirable person in that you are and have been conducting yourself so as to be dangerous to
peace, good order and good government”; “between the months of January and April 1938 you were editor
of a paper known as ‘African Sentinel,’ the purposes of which were to bring His Majesty’s Rule and His
Majesty’s European subjects into hatred, ridicule and contempt”; and that as editor of the African Sentinel,
between January and April 1938, “published or caused to be published … an article in Vol 1 No 3 at page
5, entitled ‘Why the Gold Coast Peoples are Stirred,’ calculated to bring the Governor of the Gold Coast
into hatred, ridicule and contempt.” In “I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson, Colonial Office Correspondence,”
MSS.Afr.s.1527, Rhodes House, Oxford.
436
See chapters five, seven, and eight for further discussions.
437
British officialdom would also, in the post-World War II period, redefine their category of the
“communist,” and of the “respectable” African to include in the latter category erstwhile labeled
“communist” who were perceived to have made the ideological shift towards acceptance as the
Interlocuteurs Valables – the partners worth working with.
Chapter Four
438
The interwar crises had been attenuated as a result of wartime exigencies, to continue in the post-World
War II period and heightened by the felt adverse effects of the war.
439
Series of workers’ strikes, women protest movements, farmers’ protests, and other local disturbances,
etc., had arisen, at the onset, as expressions of felt economic grievances, as some hitherto studies have
indicated.
440
The protest movement of the Lagos market women traders organized into the Lagos Market Women’
Association (LMWA) originated in the interwar period but continued into the immediate postwar period. It
did indeed arise, initially, in protest against state actions that were increasingly felt to be undermining their
perceived collective interests as traders. At the center of the LMWA’s grievances was the government’s
price control for essential foodstuffs and government's attempt to eventually take over distribution of these
under the Pullen Scheme enacted in February 1941 as part of the war exigencies. As these restrictions and
controls continued beyond the end of the war, however, the women traders protested against their
continuation. See, “Petition of the Lagos Market Women Association to Sir Arthur Frederick Richards,
Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria, through R. J. Hook,
Commissioner of the Colony, Lagos, 15 January, 1945,” Herbert Macauley Papers, University of Ibadan
Library Collections, Ibadan, Nigeria. The LMWA movement also became a community movement as it
embraced other issues that went beyond the market place as seen in their alliance with Herbert Macauley’s
Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) whose support also facilitated the LMWA’s causes.
441
The AWU movement is explored in-depth below and in subsequent chapters as relevant.
442
The immediate issues around which the Sierra Leone Women’s Movement (SLWM) was organized was
also centered around the deterioration in the living conditions of those of women and in particular, market
329
women, especially after the war. It was organized predominantly as a movement led by women and for
women at its onset. But it would also embrace issues of grassroot concerns across the board as seen in its
alliance with the SLPP. See, LaRay Denzer, “Draft of Documents Related to the Sierra Leone Women's
Movement.” Undated.
443
The LMWA, for example, did not understand why government controls should continue beyond the
cessation of the war as they had expected that the end of the war would bring economic relief from
privations they had suffered and tolerated on account of the war. Even in context of the war itself, it was
felt that such actions that deprived them of the source of their livelihood were unjustified. They made this
point clear to the government in one of four interviews that Madam Alimotu Pelewura, the LMWA
president, and a large number of the LMWA members had with Captain Pullen, the Deputy Controller of
Native Foodstuffs, at his office in Lagos. The Deputy Controller had stated to them that he “wished to sell
Gari, Palm Oil, Rice, and Pepper.” Madam Pelewura responded that it was not his line of business but was
the trade of the Lagos market women from historic past. The following day, in the presence of the
Commissioner of the Colony, she had requested the Deputy Controller “not to take bread out of the mouth
of the Lagos Market Women.” The Deputy Controller justified his involvement in trading activities on
account of wartime needs. Pelewura countered this by saying that “there was a World War like this from
1914 to 1918, during which period, no white man sold gari in Lagos till that war was over.” See “Petition
of the Lagos Market Women Association to Sir Arthur Frederick Richards, Governor and Commander-inChief of the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria, through R. J. Hook, Commissioner of the Colony, Lagos,
15 January, 1945,” Herbert Macauley Papers.
444
The AWU was organized at the onset principally in protest against the activities of the Alake of
Egbaland, Oba Ademola, that were undermining their survival as traders. The economic difficulties they
were experiencing were perceived to be compounded by the activities of the Alake, who, like many other
colonial chiefs, was continuing to use his public office to accumulate wealth in the private sectors. The
Alake was busily engaged in interpreting government regulations during and after the war years to his
advantage in such ways that the economic restrictions there were felt to be unmitigating in its adverse
effect, especially on women who made up the bulk of the traders. They therefore sought redress, at the
onset , of their economic grievances, particularly as it concerned the women traders. They complained
against the way they felt the Alake, combining the role of Sole Native Authority with that of MerchantKing, was compounding the problem of trade and of their livelihood in this place. The Women's Union
Grievances presented to Mr. J. H. Blair, Resident Abeokuta Province, 31.5.48, 1, Ransome Kuti Paper.
445
Ibid. The Alake was accused, specifically, of monopolizing the trade in scarce resources in salt,
clothings, indigo dye, rice and gari, the main articles of trade for the women and the main staples of the
people's diet. He was also accused of collecting illegal dues and tributes and of illegally seizing trading
items, especially rice, from women traders and then reselling these at exorbitant price. They wrote:
Rice trade was carried on in his palace at 4/- (shillings) per Olodo
measure when the rice price was fixed at 1/1d per Olodo measure, but
no one must be seen to sell rice in town ... and most of his rice was
seized from the women and nothing was paid to the poor people
446
“Suggested Reforms for the E.N.A.,” Women’s Union, 6/8/48, Ransome Kuti Papers.
447
See Funlayo Ransome Kuti, “Letter to the Editor,” West African Pilot, 25/10/48.
448
John Akiley, “All Songs Sung During the Women’s Union Demonstration, 8/1247-15/9/48,” 1,
Ransome Kuti Papers.
449
The Ogbonis in precolonial society were the kingmakers with important constitutional powers. Their
role began to be diminished at the onset of colonial administration in this and other places. Token
recognition of these bodies was made in the grant of some salaries to them but that had not carried
commensurate political power that they had enjoyed before. Even this token recognition and payment was
being now denied to them under the present Alake Ademola in Egbaland.
450
In fact, it was in context of the complex web of issues and interests that this movement soon embraced
that the democratic ideals of the movement as conceived by its founders and the issues of equity for women
330
became constantly challenged. Funlayo Ransome Kuti would fight tirelessly to try and sustain women’s
issues and issues of equity and justice at the center of the movement and at the center of national agenda as
the movement developed.
451
Workers activism is examined/discussed at various points and in a variety of ways throughout this study
as relates to the central themes of the study. Such instances of workers’ activism include the 1919 strike,
and I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson WAYL movement in Sierra Leone, the Mine Employees Union strikes in the
30s, the 1948 Gold Coast crisis, the 1950 General Strike, and the Positive Action in the Gold Coast, and the
1945 General strike among Nigerian railway strikes and the 1949 Enugu riots among the colliery workers,
the Zikists in Nigeria. Above all, many colonial social radicals are composed of laborites.
452
“The Women’s Union Grievances presented to Mr. J. H. Blair, Resident Abeokuta Province, 31.5.48, 1,”
Ransome Kuti Papers.
453
These included the perceived injustices and inequities of the Native Authority system as were felt across
the board
454
The examination of the AWU movement within the methodological framework of this study is
facilitated by the use of primary documents from the Ransome Kuti’s collections that I collected during my
earlier archival research work in Nigeria. These are supplemental with documents on the AWU and FRK
that I collected in the British archives many of which have not been used in previous studies of FRK and
the AWU.
455
See Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Nina Emma Mba, For Women and the Nation: Funlayo Ransome-Kuti of
Nigeria (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977).
456
This aspect is discussed in chapters seven and eight.
457
This is revealed in later chapters.
458
Groupness conceived in Brubaker’s terms in his book, Ethnicity Without Groups, as an event that may
or may not happen, could be said to have occurred at the point when all the disaffected groups and social
forces in the movement attained unanimity in calling for the resignation of the Alake and with the Alake’s
abdication (though temporarily) on July 29, 1948. Subsequent efforts to create groupness would be
undermined by the making of categories of gender, class, and community, etc., in mutually-exclusive terms
by some social forces within the AWU.
459
See, “Resolution of the 'The Ogbonis, Xstians and Mohammedans Mohammedans representatives at a
meeting held at the Itoku Ogboni House on Wednesday the 7th day of July, 1948.” Ransome Kuti Papers.
460
Ibid., 1. In this resolution the Alake was denounced and a call was made for his abdication.
461
Ibid., nos. 2 &11.
462
Ibid., nos. 8 & 9.
463
Ibid., nos. 4 & 5.
464
The Alake was having affairs with, or controlling women involved in marital dispute and divorce cases
before him. Sara Berry observes in her study of a section of another Yoruba community in the cocoa
growing region of Western Nigeria that the colonial chiefs exercised more power through the Native Courts
than through their functions as colonial chiefs. See Sara Berry, Fathers Work for Their Sons:
Accumulation, Mobility, and Class Formation in an Extended Yoruba Community, 28. See also Omoniyi
Adewoye, The Judicial System in Southern Nigeria, 1854-1954: Law and Justice in a Dependency (New
Jersey: Humanities Press, 1977), for a valuable study of the judicial system in colonial Southern Nigeria.
465
This was in the government’s efforts to democratize the base of government, also in response to popular
demands.
466
British officialdom’s action would also undermine this trend.
467
From the Governor of Nigeria to the Secretary of State, “Ex-Alake of Abeokuta,” Memo in “Political
Situation in Western Nigeria,” Encl. 7, October, 1950, PRO.
331
468
“Women Out of Egba Court: Suggestion Contrary To Custom and Constitution. Hostile Demonstrations
and Assemblies Are Banned: D.O. Reads Order,” Daily Times, September 22, 1948.
469
Queen mothers occupied an important place in government and women ruled as queens in Buganda and
other places.
470
“Resolution of the Ogbonis, Xstians and Mohammedans representatives of the entire people of Egbaland
passed at a meeting held at the Itoku Ogboni House on 9th July, 1948,” signed by S. K. Adelekan, a public
letter writer, Ransome Kuti Papers.
471
“Women Out of Egba Court: Suggestion Contrary To Custom and Constitution. Hostile Demonstrations
and Assemblies Are Banned: D.O. Reads Order.”
472
“Resolution of the 'The Ogbonis, Xstians and Mohammedans representatives of the entire people of
Egbaland.”
473
Ibid. It reveals the patriarchal bent of the male constituencies.
474
Women's Union, “Suggested Reforms for The E.N.A. 6/8/48,” Ransome Kuti Papers.
475
Ibid
476
Other studies have commented that it marked the entry of the Gold Coast masses into politics.
477
See further discussion below in this chapter and in chapter eight in regard to the significance of the 1948
Gold Coast crisis and in the process that ended empire in these West African colonies.
478
For his major work on the Gold Coast see, Dennis Austin, Politics in Ghana: 1946-1960 (London:
Oxford University Press, 1964).
479
Dennis Austin, “Elemental My Dear Watson,” West Africa, no. 3, February 13th, 1978. A few other
scholars would also downplay its significance, especially for the other West African colonies. See Lynn
Martin, “The Nigerian self-government crisis of 1953 and the Colonial Office,” The Journal of Imperial &
Commonwealth History 34, no 2 (June 2006): 245-261. On the other end of the spectrum is another scholar
of this period in the Gold Coast, Joseph Ngwenyu, who regarded the 1948 Gold Coast crisis as a revolution.
See, Joseph Engwenyu, “The Gold Coast Riots of 1948,” part I, unpublished paper, 28.
480
Macpherson’s communication in regard to his reservations is discussed below.
481
Alfred E. Alcock, Winds of Planning Change in Ghana Before Independence, MSS Africa r.178, 1975,
8, Rhodes House, Oxford.
482
Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Disturbances in the Gold Coast, 1948, Colonial No. 231
(London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office).
483
“[Nigeria]: letter from Sir J Macpherson (reply) to A B Cohen on Nigerian reaction to Gold Coast
report, 28 June 1948,” CO 583/287/5, no 2, [215], reprinted in Ronald Hyam (ed.), British Documents on
the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. II: The Labour Government and the End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3
(London: HMSO, 1992), 42.
484
Ibid.
485
Ibid.
486
For that reason, the Colonial Office decided to send a copy of the Watson Commission’s report ahead of
time to Governor Macpherson in order to have his comments before the impending visit of the Gold Coast
Governor, Gerald Creasy, in July 1948, and the publication of the report and release of Government’s
statement of intentions regarding the report afterwards. See “Nigeria: Letter from A B Cohen to Sir J
Macpherson (Nigeria) on implications of Watson Commission’s Report on Gold Coast,” 12 June 1948, CO
583/287/5, no 1, 214, reprinted in Ronald Hyam (ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A,
Vol. II: The Labour Government and the End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London: HMSO, 1992), 41.
487
The Commission had impressed on the Colonial Office the need to give Africans a greater share in the
forming and execution of policy, etc. See Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Disturbances in the
Gold Coast, 1948.
332
488
“Gold Coast constitution: Cabinet memorandum by Mr. Creech Jones,” 8 Oct 1949, CAB 129/36/2,
CP(49)199, [217], reprinted in Ronald Hyam (ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire Series A, Vol.
II: The Labour Government and the End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London: HMSO, 1992), 49.
489
This process of appeasement and concession-granting to “moderates” is developed further in chapter
five and eight.
490
The Nii Bonne-led movement that was the immediate precipitant of the crisis was socio-economic in
nature and limited in its goal but subsequent phases of the crisis introduced other goals and transformed the
nature of the movement. Also, latent discontent and reactions against the felt ills of the Gold Coast
government exploded on the scene.
491
Cited in Joseph Engwenyu, “The Gold Coast Riots of 1948,” part I, undated Occasional Paper, 29.
492
Ibid.
493
Ibid.
494
Ibid.
495
Ibid., 18.
496
Ibid., 18.
497
Ibid., 18. They agreed to having knowledge of it but denied the involvement of a communist plot in the
disturbances. The UGCC also denied knowing the content of what the Commission regarded as a
communist-type working program circulated by the UGCC Secretary, Kwame Nkrumah, just before the
disturbances.
498
Ibid., 19.
499
Ibid.
500
As far as Nii Bonne who started the boycott movement and spent a large sum of his own money on it
was concerned, that was the end of it. Hence his dismay in finding that the boycott movement had turned,
afterwards, into what was never envisaged originally. Alarmed at what he later witnessed as the
transformed character of the protest movement subsequent to the cessation of his initial boycott movement,
he appealed to the populace, saying:
I wish to express my deep horror at the wholesale looting which is
taking place in Accra. I am at all times ever ready to co-operate with
government for the peaceful administration of the country and I wish to
register my strong disapproval of these wanton destruction of property.
This has nothing to do with my anti-inflation campaign and the calling
of the boycott which was done peacefully.
Nii Kwabena Bonne III Osu Alata Mantse, Milestone in the History of the Gold Coast (London: 1953), 87.
His anti-inflation movement of protest – what became the first phase of the 1948 Gold Coast crisis – was
against the felt high cost of textiles and other imported goods in the Gold Coast and it continued till
February 20th & 21st, 1948 when it was called off after the government’s intervention and promise of
reduced prices on imported goods. Nii Bonne personified the peaceful spirit and limited nature of the
boycott protest movement at this stage when he said:
The only purpose of my campaign had been to bring down the cost of
living and to improve the lot of the poor. My own expenses in running
it amounted to nearly 1,000 (pounds sterling) of my own money … I
had no wish whatever of being dragged into the arena of politics and I
was determined to prevent by all means the possibility of anybody
making use of my campaign for political purposes which would have
had nothing to do with its original aims.
333
He was sincere about his motive. Hence he refused the overtures from Danquah as well as the attempt
made by the colonial authority to bribe him at the beginning of the movement to have him call off the
strike.
501
This was reported to be contrary to stated previous agreement between the Ex-Servicemen Union and
the Commissioner of Police to follow a different route other than the one leading to the Governor’s house.
502
Recorded in Joseph Engwenyu, “The Gold Coast Riots of 1948,” 20.
503
“From Governor to Secretary of State,” Telegram 218, dated March 8, 1948, CO 96/795/31312/2 Part 1,
cited in Joseph Engwenyu, ‘The Gold Coast Riots of 1948.’
504
See the official account of the causes of the disturbances in the Watson’s Commission Report, i.e.,
Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Disturbances in the Gold Coast, 1948. The UGCC was headed
by Dr. Danquah and was the main political and anti-colonial organization in the Gold Coast at this time
before the formation of the CPP.
505
Rather than engage with the crises constructively as issues of social change and social policy, they had
preferred to reduce them in significance and to attribute these to the work of “agitators,” “irresponsibles,”
and “communists,” influenced by external forces.
506
Governor Gerald Creasy, Gold Coast Legislative Council Debates, March 1948.
507
Officials initially failed to see the crises as, in part, culmination of pent-up grievances among the crosssection of the Gold Coast populace and as indicative of desired changes in the Native Authority system of
governance and for effective African participation in the colony’s governing institutions, as the Watson’s
Commission would later attempt to bear out as well. See Report of the Commission of Enquiry into
Disturbances in the Gold Coast, 1948.
508
“Gold Coast Constitution: address by Mr. Griffiths to Colonial Group of the Royal Empire Society,” 1
May 1951, CO 96/820/2, no 39, [225[, reprinted in Ronald Hyam (ed.), British Documents on the End of
Empire. Series A, Vol. II: The Labour Government and the End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London:
HMSO, 1992).
509
Ibid., 71.
510
Dennis Austin also, unfortunately, still regarded Gold Coast as a model colony as late as 1978. See
Dennis Austin, “Elemental My Dear Watson,” West Africa, No. 3, February 13th, 1978.
511
“Gold Coast Constitution: address by Mr. Griffiths to Colonial Group of the Royal Empire Society.”
512
They were already experiencing such feared communist-inspired uprisings in the West Indies and
elsewhere.
513
“Governor Sir Gerald Creasy to The Right Hon. Arthur Creech-Jones, MP, Secretary of State for the
Colonies,” Secret and Personal, 22nd March, 1948, CO 537/3558, Encl. 128, 3/20/1948, PRO.
514
Ibid.
515
Communist and Pan-African organization’s involvement came afterwards in terms of moral support.
516
Reported in the Secretary of State’s reply to Gerald Creasy’s telegram No. 261 and No. 238. “From the
Secretary of State for the Colonies To Gold Coast (Sir G. Creasy),” Outward Telegram No. 259, 18th
March, 1948, CO 537/3558/4220, 2, PRO. Joseph Engwenyu commented that there was no evidence of
direct links between the British Communist Party and the UGCC as contributory factor to the riots and
refuted George Padmore’s claim of Pan African support and involvement in the outbreak of the riot. He
also refuted other rumors pertaining, for example, to the American connection in the riots or of the alleged
Mr. Burt as intermediary between the British Communist Party and the UGCC. See Joseph Engwenyu,
“The Gold Coast Riots of 1948,” 14.
517
“Governor Sir Gerald Creasy to The Right Hon. Arthur Creech-Jones, MP, Secretary of State for the
Colonies,” Secret and Personal, 22nd March, 1948, CO 537/3558/4220, 1, PRO.
334
518
Ibid. He feared that His Majesty’s Government might have to send a comparatively large force to pacify
the country in “a position of such extreme gravity.” Although he expressed that “such eventualities were
too pessimistic,” he still felt they “should be prepared for them.”
519
This feeling was also shared by the Acting General Officer commanding West Africa. CO
537/3558/4220, 1, PRO.
520
“Governor Gerald Creasy to Secretary of State for the Colonies,” 22nd March, 1948, CO
537/3558/4220, 1, PRO.
521
“From the Secretary of State for the Colonies To Sir G. Creasy,” CO 537/3558, 9th April, 1948, PRO.
522
“From the Secretary of State for the Colonies To Gold Coast (Sir G. Creasy),” CO 537/3558, 18 March,
1948, 1, PRO. It is not certain that such secret investigation was carried out and if it was and perhaps
because of the secret nature of it, the findings might have been among the secret documents noted in
chapter three as destroyed in the Foreign Office Archive at the Public Records Office in London.
523
Ibid., 2.
524
Creech-Jones had also indicated that sending a representative might indicate a clash of opinion between
the two of them or as indicative of the Governor’s ineffectiveness to handle local situations, Secretary of
State to Creasy, 3/21/1948.
525
“From the Secretary of State for the Colonies To Gold Coast (Sir G. Creasy),” Outward Telegram, CO
537/3558, 18 March, 1948, 1, PRO.
526
Ibid.
527
The West African National Secretariat (WANS) was an inner circle founded within WASU by more
socially radical West African students.
528
“From the Secretary of State for the Colonies To Sir G. Creasy, Gold Coast,” Outward Telegram No.
259, 18th March, 1948, CO 537/3558/4220, 2, PRO.
529
Ibid.
530
Ibid.
531
Ibid.
532
Ibid.
533
Ibid.
534
Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain, 106, 139 This was a period that coincided with the radicalization
of WASU issuing from its disappointment with the Labor Party when it came into power in 1945, as
revealed in chapter three
535
USCIA Reports: Communism in Africa, 1945-1960, cited in Nike Adebiyi, “Radical Nationalism and the
Politics of Anticolonialism in British West Africa, 1940-1960,” 1989.
536
Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Disturbances in the Gold Coast, 1948, 17.
537
Ibid.
538
Ibid. This was according to the document alleged to be found among Mr. Nkrumah’s papers purporting
to be the Constitution of The Circle.
539
Ibid. They did concede, though, in regard to The Circle, that there was no evidence that it ever became
a live body. The six men which included Nkrumah that had been detained under the Emergency Provision
of Regulation 29 had been brought before the Commission to present their evidence and were represented
by Counsel.
540
Ibid.
541
Ibid.
335
542
Ibid. The means, in this case, included communist tactics and support.
543
Ibid., 18.
544
Among those arrested in the 1948 Gold Coast crisis were former WASU members – J. B. Danquah,
Kwame Nkrumah, Ako Adjei, William Ofori S. Atta, and E. O. Lamptey.
545
“From the Secretary of State for the Colonies To Gold Coast (Sir G. Creasy),” Memo, CO 537/3558, 18
March, 1948, PRO. The Watson’s Commission had also expressed the belief that they “did not think that
many Africans did,” i.e., believed in communism. The onus was placed, instead, on the “six evil men” and
a few other accomplices all of who were made larger than life in this regard. See Report of the Commission
of Enquiry into Disturbances in the Gold Coast, 1948.
546
USCIA Reports: Communism in Africa, 1945-1960.
547
Ibid.
548
Ibid.
549
Ibid.
Chapter Five
550
See below for the exploration of aspects of Nkrumah’s and Azikiwe’s political career and their
repositioning at this time.
551
“[West Africa]: memorandum by A B Cohen on Anglo-French relations: survey of constitutional
progress in British territories,” [Extract], 20 Nov 1951, CO 537/7148, no 17, [228], reprinted in Ronald
Hyam (ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. II: The Labour Government and the
End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London: HMSO, 1992), 77.
552
Ibid.
553
“Amendment of the Gold Coast Constitution: Cabinet memorandum by Mr. Lyttelton,” 9 Feb 1952,
CAB 129/49, C(52)28, [265], reprinted in David Goldsworthy (ed.), British Documents on the End of
Empire. Series A, Vol. II: The Conservative Government and the End of Empire 1951-1957, Part 2
(London: HMSO, 1994), 187-188.
554
This aspect is examined at some length in chapter seven.
555
From the Secretary of State to Gold Coast, Sir G. Creasy, Outward Telegram, 18th March, 1948, CO
537/3558, 1, and From The Secretary of State To Sir Gerald Creasy, Enclosure 162, Secret and Personal,
9th April, 1948, CO 537/3558.
556
Ibid. This included what he regarded as “some pretty radical change” in the import trade involving
possible ways in which Africans might be given a larger share in the importing and distributing trades than
they had till then
557
Ibid.
558
Chapter three discusses in some more detail official labeling of African critics of colonial
administration.
559
Letter from H. Cooper to Mr. K. W. Blackburne, Director of Information Service, Colonial Office, CO
537/5133, 3rd October, 1947, PRO.
560
Letter from H. Cooper, Public Relations Officer, to Mr. K. W. Blackburne, Colonial Office, dated 13th
October, 1947, Enclosure 1, CO 537/5133, PRO.
561
Ibid.
562
Ibid.
336
563
These were the overseas students that mainstream officialdom would rather perceive as channels of
communism into the colonies. See discussion of aspects of this in chapter three.
564
Letter from H. Cooper, Public Relations Officer, to Mr. K. W. Blackburne, Colonial Office, dated 13th
October, 1947, Enclosure 1, CO 537/5133.
565
Ibid. Cooper’s line of policy was attacked by some as being “appeasement,” etc. In his defense, Cooper
stated that his critics’ “militant, pro-government campaign” may be good journalism but poor public
relations.
566
Letter from H. Cooper, Public Relations Officer, to Mr. K. W. Blackburne Colonial Office, dated 13th
October, 1947.
567
Ibid.
568
That was before the shift by officialdom later towards reconstituting some of them as “moderates.”
569
For example, the meteoric rise of Azikiwe in Nigerian politics centered in Lagos in the 40s was
beginning to be undercut by the growing Yoruba nationalism of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa and later, the
Action Group political party. These were organized by Azikiwe’s would-be political rivals and
spearheaded by Obafemi Awolowo and other Yoruba leaders. They accused Azikiwe of furthering Ibo
nationalism and of attempted Ibo domination of the Yorubas and other Nigerian ethnic groups.
570
Letter from H. Cooper, Public Relations Officer, to Mr. K. W. Blackburne, Colonial Office, dated 13th
October, 1947, Enclosure 1.
571
Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Disturbances in the Gold Coast, 1948, 24. That was indeed a
strong indictment of colonial officials on the spot.
572
Letter from H. Cooper, Public Relations Officer, to Mr. K. W. Blackburne, Colonial Office, dated 13th
October, 1947, Enclosure 1.
573
Creech-Jones was also quick to assure Creasy: “I am sure you will not regard this as an implied criticism
of anything you have said but purely as a personal reply to your enquiry as to how I see the matter of
policy.” Outward Telegram from The Secretary of State for the Colonies, Hon. Arthur Creech-Jones, M.P.,
to Sir G. Creasy, Gold Coast, 18th March, 1948, CO 537/3558/4220, 2, PRO.
574
See chapter three for the exam of this attitude especially in relation to of I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson.
575
The British colonial power actually tried to reorder the relationship between them and the colonial chiefs
in the Gold Coast, for example, by introducing measures to maintain more effective control over them but
the chiefs kicked against these efforts, protesting that it was precisely that control that they resented. When
the chiefs subsequently joined forces with the rest of the population in seeking for change in society and
presented the Secretary of State, Oliver Stanley, with a 400-page Memo on Needs on his visit to the colony
in 1943, officialdom backpedaled on the chiefs. Hargreaves commented that the British were not ready to
jeopardize the basis of their collaborative rule with the chiefs as the chiefs were at the head of this
movement and actually presented the Memo to Stanley! See, for example, John D. Hargreaves, ‘‘Towards
the Transfer of Power in British West Africa,” in Prosser Gifford and W. M. Roger Louis, eds., The
Transfer of Power in Africa: Decolonization 1940-1960 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
576
This was unacceptable to the Western educated Africans in the UGCC and all who had been important
component of the movement for change at the turn of the 40s in the Gold Coast, for example. It is true that
the colonial government had tried to bring in some of the western educated Africans in the 1946/47
Constitutions which were enacted over 20 years since the last ones in these colonies. The new constitutions
provided for an elected majority in the colonies’ legislatures and some openings for the inclusion of some
western educated elements in the Gold Coast Legislative Councils and in the legislatures of the other
colonies. But the change was highly circumscribed. Not only did the new constitutions not give real power
to the Africans represented in this body, the stakes also continued to be piled in favor of the colonial chiefs
vis-à-vis the western educated Africans as the former also used the loopholes in the constitutional
provisions to further entrench themselves in office and by bringing in their favorites. Election into the
337
Legislative Councils was by the chiefs who elected for the most part members of their own class. This
included a handful of western-educated sons of chiefs.
577
Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Disturbances in the Gold Coast, 1948.
578
This is revealed in chapter eight.
579
Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Disturbances in the Gold Coast, 1948, 24.
580
Ibid., 8.
581
Ibid., 24. The All-African Coussey Commission, however, tried to rebut some of the charges against the
chiefs and to seek to rehabilitate them.
582
Danquah would later rationalize the goals and involvement of the UGCC in the 1948 disturbances,
reiterating that the UGCC was not calling for “complete independence at once.”
583
Letter from H. Cooper, Public Relations Officer, to Mr. K. W. Blackburne, Colonial Office, dated 13th
October, 1947, Enclosure 1, CO 537/5133, PRO.
584
Ibid.
585
It could not be said that colonial officials were at this time now following Cooper’s script precept upon
precept, but perhaps were reflecting his general ideas.
586
Letter from H. Cooper to Mr. K. W. Blackburne, Colonial Office, dated 13th October, 1947, Enclosure
1, CO 537/5133, PRO.
587
Ibid., 2.
588
From the Secretary of State to Sir G. Creasy (Governor, Gold Coast), 18th March, 1948, 1, CO
537/3558, PRO.
589
Chapter Five: “Constitutional and Political Reform,” in Report of the Commission of Enquiry into
Disturbances in the Gold Coast, 1948, 24.
590
Ibid.
591
Joseph Engwenyu, “Labour and Politics in Ghana: The Militant Phase 1947–1950,” Paper submitted to
the 12th Annual Conference, Canadian Association for African Studies, University of Toronto, May 10-14,
1982, 28. He also remarked that their roles in the 1948 crisis were ambivalent and that the links between
them and the events were at best circumstantial, though this may be overstating the differences between
them in regard to their participation in the crisis. Danquah also tried to rationalize his participation by
minimizing the extent of his and the UGCC’s involvement and downplaying their intent
592
Ibid. The CPP was a politically radical party composed of a wide cross-section of Gold Coast society.
593
Daily Echo, 19th April 1948, quoted in Joseph Engwenyu, “Labour and Politics in Ghana: The Militant
Phase 1947-1950,” 29. Danquah’s strong assertion in April, 1948 after the riots had by then subsided and
when the colonial authorities were beginning to punish those implicated appear to be somewhat a
rationalization of the position of someone who was implicated in the signature of two telegrams prepared to
be sent to the World Press and signed “President, United Gold Coast Convention,” in the course of the
1948 crisis. See Appendix 13 & 14, Watson’s Commission Report.
594
The All-African Coussey Committee that was set up to implement the recommendations of the Watson’s
Commission towards the grant of a new Constitution was stacked full of UGCC members, including
Danquah.
595
From the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Hon. Arthur Creech-Jones, M.P., To Sir G. Creasy, Gold
Coast, Telegram No. 259, 18th March, 1948, CO 537/3558/4220, 2, PRO.
596
See more discussion of this in chapters seven and chapter eight.
597
From the Secretary of State for the Colonies To Sir G. Creasy, CO 537/3558, 9th April, 1948, PRO.
338
598
Report of Watson’s Commission of Enquiry. The Colonial Office, in its own attempted defense, stated
that: “If some of the Commission’s recommendations appear to involve radical changes of system, it is not
to be implied that they have not themselves recognized the inevitability of advance by stages.” See
Statement by His Majesty’s Government On the Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Disturbances in
the Gold Coast, 1948, Colonial Office Colonial No. 232 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1948).
599
Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Disturbances in the Gold Coast, 1948, 24.
600
“Gold Coast Constitution: address by Mr. Griffiths to Colonial Group of the Royal Empire Society,” 1
May 1951, CO 96/820/2, no 39 Extract in Ronald Hyam (ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire.
Series A, Vol. II: The Labour Government and the End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London: HMSO,
1992), 71.
601
Ibid. He believed that “whatever their rights or wrongs, [they] generated political feeling, and led to a
rapid growth of political consciousness.”
602
See discussion of this in sections below and in subsequent chapters.
603
The 1946 Richard’s Constitution had hitherto been meant to be subject to review only after nine years
and to involve only certain features of it after 3- and 6- years.
604
The Governor of Nigeria was kept in close touch of the rapid developments in the Gold Coast and the
plan of constitutional reviews by the Colonial Office as these changes were known to also have implication
for all of their West African territories. See “[Nigeria]: Letter from A. B Cohen to Sir J Macpherson
(Nigeria) on implications of Watson Commission’s report on Gold Coast,” 12 June 1948, 214, CO
583/287/5, no 1, [214], reprinted in Ronald Hyam (ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A,
Vol. II: The Labour Government and the End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London: HMSO, 1992), 41.
605
“Nigerian constitution: Cabinet memorandum by Mr. Griffiths, 3 May 1950,” CAB 129/39, CP(50)94,
[221[, reprinted in Ronald Hyam (ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. II: The
Labour Government and the End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London: HMSO, 1992), 52-53.
606
Ibid.
607
Creech Jones was writing to Halliday to seek the College’s approval in releasing Sir Thomas Creed,
Secretary of King’s College, London, who had been in office for only three months before then and who
was willing to accept the position of the proposed Chairmanship of the Commission of Enquiry into the
Gold Coast disturbances provided the College released him to serve for the period of time needed. See
“[Gold Coast]:appointment of a chairman for the committee of inquiry into Accra riots: letter from Mr.
Creech-Jones to Prof Sir W Halliday (King’s College, London),” 20 March 1948, CO 96/796/3, no 24C,
[213[, reprinted in Ronald Hyam (ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. II: The
Labour Government and the End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London: HMSO, 1992), 39-41.
608
Ibid., 40-41.
609
Alfred E. Alcock, Winds of Planning Change in Ghana Before Independence. MSS Africa r.178, 1975,
8, Rhodes House, Oxford.
610
See exploration of aspects of these in later sections of this chapter and in subsequent chapters.
611
See chapter seven for further exploration as well as author’s critique of the social radicals and of
radicalism.
612
The beginning intersection of socially-relevant conflicts of interest and nationally-relevant conflicts of
interest at the end of the 40s and the 50s intensified the crisis at the level of African society and at the level
of the colonial state.
613
Fred Cooper also comments on the fact that the crises in the colonies loomed larger in official mind
against the background of crises elsewhere such as the violent revolution in Indochina and Algeria, the
quagmire in Palestine, the 1956 Suez embarrassment, etc. All these, he commented, shaped the
background against which even smaller scale threats in Africa were perceived and in relation to which
339
British interests had to be realistically assessed. See Fred Cooper. Decolonization and African Society: the
Labor Question in French and British Africa, 390.
614
British colonial officials were having to confront more seriously the fact that the old chiefly elites on
whom their rule in West Africa had been largely predicated were not being effective in helping to stabilize
colonial society.
615
The All-African Coussey Commission that was set up in December 1948 to implement some of the
recommendations of the preceding Watson’s Commission was stacked full of UGCC members and chiefs.
The Coussey Commission had rebutted many of the indictments against the chiefs by the Watson’s
Commission.
616
Debate on the Governor’s Address 19th January 1950, Speech by I. K. Agyeman, elected in 1946 by the
Ashanti Confederacy Council. Quoted in Joseph Engwenyu, “The Working Class and the Politics of
Constitutional Independence: The ‘Positive Action’ and the General Strike of 1950 in the Gold Coast,” 2021.
617
Ibid.
618
The crisis in Iperu and Ogere local government and the Egbe’s involvement under Obafemi Awolowo is
discussed further in chapter six.
619
See discussions of these in subsequent chapters.
620
They would exercise this doubt over and over again for some period after this.
621
The CPP had already sent a letter to Arden-Clarke on Friday, 9th February to have him meet a deputation
of their Executive Committee that afternoon to discuss the immediate release of Kwame Nkrumah, their
leader, and other imprisoned members of CPP but he had worked it out that they would meet with him in
the afternoon of Monday, 12th February instead. In the morning of the same Monday, however, ArdenClarke released Nkrumah and a few of the imprisoned CPP men ahead of the planned afternoon meeting
with the CPP executives. He achieved his purpose. See “[Gold Coast]: letter from Governor Sir C. ArdenClarke to A. B. Cohen about political situation, 5 Mar 1951,” CO 537/7181, no 3, [224], in Ronald Hyam
(ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. II: The Labour Government and the End of
Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London: HMSO, 1992), 66.
622
Ibid.
623
Ibid. He was fearful of potential mass disturbances should he not release Nkrumah from prison to serve
as one of his party’s elected members in the House of Assembly.
624
Ibid.
625
“[Gold Coast]: letter from Governor Sir C. Arden-Clarke to A. B. Cohen about political situation, 5 Mar
1951,” CO 537/7181, no 3, [224], in Ronald Hyam (ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire. Series
A, Vol. II: The Labour Government and the End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London: HMSO, 1992), 68.
626
Ibid.
627
Ibid., 68-69.
628
Quoted in Alan Feinstein, African Revolutionary: The Life and Times of Nigeria’s Aminu Kano, 115.
The basic info on Aminu Kano follows closely on Feinstein’s account.
629
He had been studying at the London University’s Institute of Education on a one-year scholarship from
September 1946-47. See earlier reference to Aminu Kano in chapter three.
630
Alan Feinstein. African Revolutionary, 119.
631
The Governor had purposely left out Bauchi, knowing that the core of radicals there would put him to
task on a number of burning issues.
632
Malam Sa’adu Zungur was a Hausa, born into a learned family, and was schooled in both English and
Arabic. He is revered as an inspirational critic of the system of emirate rule. He was a Koranic scholar and
also trained as a medical dispenser. In 1943-44 one of the most important early societies in the North – the
340
Bauchi General Improvement Union - was established largely through Zungur’s efforts. He was Federal
Secretary of the NCNC from 1948 to 1951 and in 1949, he accompanied Azikiwe to Europe and attended
with him a meeting of the Council of Peoples Against Imperialism, a group led by Hon. Fenner Brockway,
M.P., in 1949. Zungur was a very strong influence on Aminu Kano and also very influential in NEPU. He
died in 1958 after a lingering illness.
633
Alan Feinstein, African Revolutionary, 111.
634
Ibid., 110-111.
635
Ibid., 106.
636
Ibid.
637
See chapter three for discussion of his leftwing contacts and exposure while he was in Britain.
638
Feinstein, African Revolutionary, 114-116. Mr. Knott, the British Chief Secretary in the Nigerian
government, had invited Aminu down to Kaduna for a meeting with him but he was not told that the
Governor would also be present. To Aminu’s surprise, the new Governor of Nigeria, MacPherson, was
also there waiting for him to say a word or two to him.
639
Ibid., 115.
640
ibid.
641
Ibid.
642
Ibid., 118.
643
Secretary of State for the Colonies to Sir G. Creasy, 18th March, 1, 1948, CO 537/3558/4220, 2, PRO.
644
The West African Pilot (WAP) was Azikiwe’s major newspaper which established his dominance in
Nigerian politics, as Anthony Enahoro, a former editor of one of Azikiwe’s chain of newspaper, the Daily
Comet, noted. Compared with Nigerian journalism which catered more to the interest of doctors, lawyers,
senior civil servants, and other elitist groups before the advent of Azikiwe and his WAP on the scene, the
Pilot catered to the masses, arousing critical consciousness. See Anthony Enahoro, Nnamdi Azikiwe: Saint
or Sinner? (Stanford: Hoover Institute on War, Revolution, and Peace, 1955). Azikiwe’s other group of
newspapers included the Eastern Nigeria Guardian (Port Harcourt, 1940), Nigerian Spokesman (Onitsha,
1943), Southern Nigeria Defender (Warri, 1943), and Daily Comet (1944), but none enjoyed as wide a
circulation or popularity as the WAP.
645
After being denied a job in the colonies at the completion of his studies in the U.S., Azikiwe accepted an
offer to edit the African Morning Post, a daily newspaper in Accra, Gold Coast, in 1934.
646
Azikiwe and Wallace-Johnson were both prosecuted and convicted in 1937 for seditious article in the
African Morning Post titled, ‘Has the African a God’, but their convictions were reversed on appeal.
Azikiwe went to Nigeria afterwards.
647
Michael Imoudu was thrust into the limelight as the principal leader of the June 1945 Nigerian General
Strike and became President of the Nigerian Railway Workers’ Union.
648
Nnamdi Azikiwe, My Odyssey: an Autobiography (London: C. Hurst, 1970), 282.
649
Ibid.
650
One of the major points of opposition to the 1946 Constitution was the division of the country into three
regions, what Azikiwe defined as Pakistanism. The division would stand, strongly supported by Obafemi
Awolowo, leading the Yoruba-based Egbe Omo Oduduwa (EOO) organization and later, the Western
regional-based political party, the Action Group, whose philosophical position was underpinned precisely
by this regionalist framework. Azikiwe would also shift his position to accept this framework in the 50s.
651
Nnamdi Azikiwe, “Before Us Lies the Open Grave,” a Presidential address, May 7, 1947 (printed as a
pamphlet), quoted in Richard L. Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties: Power in an Emergent African Nation,
62.
341
652
The Zikist Movement was created in 1946, principally by Nwafor Orizu. See discussion of this
movement in chapter seven.
653
Sklar reported that Azikiwe had told him he had contemplated visits to Prague and Moscow but that he
cancelled such plans because of “technical difficulties and second thoughts” and had accepted invitation
from the Moral Rearmament instead. See Richard Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties, 76.
654
Nnamdi Azikiwe, My Odyssey: an Autobiography. Officials in the Colonial Office always expressed
surprise whenever they met Azikiwe for the first time because their previously formed impression of him
did not always match the more favorably disposed person they met in person.
655
Ibid.
656
Ibid.
657
Ibid., 162.
658
Note of an interview given by Zik to Scorey, CO 537/5807, PRO.
659
Ibid.
660
Ibid.
661
Azikiwe, The Development of Political Parties, 15 Pakistanism refers to the breakup of India into two
nations: India and Pakistan; and the further division of Pakistan later into two: Pakistan & Bangladesh.
662
From R. E. Webb, Head of British Commonwealth Section, British Information Service, to The
Controller, “Re: Visit to British Information Service of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, January 20, 1950,” CO
537/5807, PRO.
663
His newspaper, the West African Pilot (WAP), carried series of articles during this period.
664
Anthony Enahoro, Nnamdi Azikiwe: Saint or Sinner? See also “Reuter's report on the Assassination of
Zik,” undated document, University of Ibadan Library, Nigeria.
665
They did fear the propagating influence of his newspapers in furthering the cause of the strikers, though,
and therefore took action to ban the Zikist newspapers from circulation for a while.
666
See Anthony Enahoro, Nnamdi Azikiwe: Saint or Sinner? Enahoro, one of Azikiwe’s subsequent critics,
observed that whether Azikiwe deliberately “bamboozled this country is a question time will answer” and
that “[we] interpret Nnamdi Azikiwe’s prompt retirement to Onitsha as a huge joke, a cowardly act or a
wise and judicious step, according to our several opinions of the man.”
667
Milverton, A. F., “Tape recording and transcripts of an interview with A. H. M. Kirk-Green,” in
MSS.Brit.Emp.s.368, Rhodes House, Oxford.
668
The Zikists were radical youths and labor within the NCNC who conceived the movement as geared
towards the radicalization of the NCNC from within. See chapter seven for further discussion of the
Zikists. They reflected the albeit politically radical side of Azikiwe.
669
See Richard L. Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties: Power in an Emergent African Nation, 75-76.
670
They would be readmitted to the NCNC in 1957.
671
Sklar noted that Azikiwe appeared to have regarded the conduct of the Zikists in October 27, 1948, for
example, as irresponsible, and that “yet his attitude was ambiguous.” This was in reference to the speech of
the Zikist, Agwuma, titled “A Call to Revolution” for which the government accused him and other Zikists
of treason and imprisoned him and a number of other Zikists implicated in the gathering at which the
speech was made. Richard L. Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties: Power in an Emergent African Nation, 7576.
672
Sunday Times, April 17, 1950.
673
The government outlawed the movement as a result of a Zikist attempted assassination of the Colonial
Secretary, Mr. Hugh Foot.
342
674
Reuter, Lagos, April 21, 1950.
675
Ibid.
676
The Zikist movement was also created initially for Azikiwe’s aggrandizement at the time it was formed.
677
Reuter, Lagos, April 21, 1950.
678
Ibid.
679
Secret Document to J. K. Thompson, British Embassy, Washington, Colonial Office, CO 537/5807,
PRO.
680
From R. E. Webb, Head of British Commonwealth Section, British Information Service, to The
Controller, “Re: Visit to British Information Service of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, January 20, 1950,” CO
537/5807, PRO.
681
Memo to Mr. Evans, in “Colonial Newspapers: ‘The Zik Press in Nigeria,”’ CO 537/5133, 28/8/47,
PRO. The memo was signed “rwrs” and is not clear who it came from as the signature was illegible. The
memo was in regard to the possibility of setting up private, i.e., British-owned, newspapers in West Africa
as means of counteracting the effect of local newspapers, especially Zik’s newspapers, and also of
introducing legislation to control the press.
682
Memo to Robinson in “Colonial Newspapers: ‘The Zik Press in Nigeria,”’ CO 537/5133, 30/9/47, PRO.
The signature, the only evidence of the sender, was also quite illegible but I suspect it also came from the
same person that sent the preceding August 28, 1947 memo to Mr. Evans.
683
Mr. Blackburne to H. Cooper, Encl. 3, ‘Colonial Newspapers: “The Zik Press in Nigeria,”’ Encl. 3, CO
537/5133, 2nd January, 1948, PRO. Mr. Blackburne, Director of Information Service, Colonial Office, put
forward possible suggestions to H. Cooper in his letter in regard to how to deal with the “Zik problem,” as
“we felt that he might be even more troublesome than before when he returned from his fruitless visit to
London,” he stated, referring to another visit of Azikiwe to London.
684
To Mr. Blackbourne from S. H. Evans, 20.9.47, “Colonial Newspapers: ‘The Zik Press in Nigeria,”’ CO
537/5133, PRO. Various suggestions were put forward and it was emphasized that “under no
circumstances should Zik be allowed to have the field to himself.”
685
Officials felt reluctant to do so in the belief that it might do more harm than good and also that
international considerations would make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for H.M.O. to support any
such legislative means of control. Memo to Mr. Robinson (signed by the same officials mentioned above
whose signature was illegible), “Colonial Newspapers: ‘The Zik Press in Nigeria,”’ CO 537/5133, 30/9/47,
PRO.
686
It was suggested to create 2 or 3 propaganda themes to be “plugged” repeatedly and through every
medium to the effect that: 1) “The British are our very good friends and have our well-being genuinely at
heart,” 2) “We need the help of the British and it is very much to our advantage to be members of a big
world family,” and 3) “With British help, providing we ourselves work hard, we can become a great
nation.” See, To Mr. Blackbourne from S. H. Evans, 20.9.47, “Colonial Newspapers: ‘The Zik Press in
Nigeria,”’ CO 537/5133, PRO.
687
Ibid. The intent, as stated in the memo, was to ensure that items which the PRO officer and his staff had
specially edited and given a Nigerian “angle,” in particular sports news, were published.
688
Ibid.
689
Letter from Mr. H. Cooper, Public Relations Officer, to Mr. K. W. Blackburne, Director of Information
Services, Encl. 4, ‘Colonial Newspapers: “The Zik Press in Nigeria,”’ CO 537/5133, 13th April, 1948, PRO,
London.
690
They also felt so about Nkrumah of the Gold Coast for a while, even when he was already moderating
his political rhetorics and practices once he entered the institutions of government.
691
Letter from Mr. H. Cooper, Public Relations Officer, to Mr. K.W. Blackburne, Director of Information
Services, 13th April, 1948, Enclosure 4, CO537/5133, PRO.
343
692
Ibid.
693
Letter from Mr. H. Cooper, Public Relations Officer, to Mr. K.W. Blackburne, Director of Information
Services, 13th April, 1948, CO537/5133, PRO.
694
Ibid.
695
The same would apply to Nkrumah. Azikiwe and Nkrumah were thought to be symbolic of many of the
undesirable things officials had come to associate radical critics of colonial administration with.
696
Letter from Mr. H. Cooper, Public Relations Officer, to Mr. K.W. Blackburne, Director of Information
Services, 13th April, 1948, Enclosure 4, CO537/5133, PRO. This was in regard to Azikiwe’s exclusion
from representation in the Legislature due to the way the voting procedure was manipulated by the
unofficial members in the Legislative Council to exclude Azikiwe, contrary to the normal procedure of
each Region choosing its own representative as the Chief Secretary had suggested.
697
Ibid.
698
Unlike in the Gold Coast, where CPP rivals in the UGCC and other rival political movements were
clamoring for a decentralized constitution, British officialdom preferred a unitary constitution there, backed
also by the CPP, as more reflective of the ethnic composition there.
699
See Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties: Power in an Emergent African Nation, 145.
700
Ibid., 144-145. This was on the basis of federalism.
701
NCNC, “Report of the Fifth Annual Convention held at Enugu, January 6-10, 1954,” 1, 16.
(Mimeographed), cited in Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties, 145. The constitution of the party was
reformulated to accept the principle of federalism with the provisos that residual powers should be vested
in the central government and that additional states or regions should be created.
702
Ibid., 150.
703
“An Appeal to the NCNC Convention Delegates,” (Sixth Annual Convention of the NCNC, Ibadan,
May. 1955) Mimeographed, signed by Osita Agwuma, Mokwugo Okoye, J.E. Otobo, F. M. Yamu Numa
“and 56 other NCNC members” (not named), cited in Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties, 150-151.
704
Ibid.
705
Ibid.
706
He was centrally involved in the Zikist movement and other revolutionary-inclined movements and
organizations in Nigeria in the dying years of imperial rule in this colony. See sections in chapters seven
and eight for some exploration of his activities.
707
Nduka Eze, Rebel Line..
708
West African Pilot, August 1938.
709
Colonial Office secret document to J. K. Thompson, April 1950, British Embassy, Washington, CO
537/5807, PRO, London.
710
Ibid.
711
Ibid.
712
Sir J. Macpherson to Secretary of State, April 1950, CO 537/5807, PRO.
713
Secretary of State to the Colonial Attache, Washington, telegram , 27 April, 1950 on Zik, CO 537/5807,
PRO.
714
Azikiwe was poised to reap the advantages that he hoped to achieve by his skilful positioning and
equivocal stance towards the radicals.
715
Nkrumah in the Gold Coast would also do the same with the Gold Coast labor left and radical trade
unionism.
344
716
Richard Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties, 85.
717
Ibid.
718
Ibid.
719
Ibid.
720
See “Note of an interview given by Zik to Scorey,” CO 537/5807, PRO. Should Azikiwe not be able to
achieve his goals through constitutional means, Azikiwe would be ready to go “the way of the extremists.”
Colonial officials were correct in their assessment that Azikiwe would be ready to profit by violence as
long as he was not directly associated with it! See, Colonial Office secret document to J. K. Thompson,
British Embassy, Washington, CO 537/5807, PRO.
721
See chapter three for a discussion of the post-1945 radical shift in WASU.
722
Colonial officials were fearful of WANS as having “communist affiliations.” French and Belgian
authorities, along with Britain, were concerned at the “Anti-White movement.” See “Proposed All West
African National Congress Organization by Kwame Nkrumah,” FO 371/72936/23350/3350/4, PRO.
Another report claimed that the WANS, with its headquarters in London, also had communist affiliations,
F.O. 371/27759, PRO.
723
According to Nkrumah’s statement in his autobiography, a vanguard group within WANS called “The
Circle” and headed by Nkrumah began to train themselves ready to commence “revolutionary” work in any
part of the African continent. See Kwame Nkrumah, The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (New York:
International Publishers, 1972), 61. The WASU was the foremost West African students’ organization in
London which tried to shape public opinion in Britain and sought to move British officialdom towards the
paths of democratic reforms in the colonies and timely political independence. See chapter three for further
discussions on WASU.
724
Report of the Watson’s Commission, 17.
725
Ibid., 18. This claim was not denied either by Danquah or Nkrumah or other members of the UGCC
who had appeared before the Commission.
726
See, for example, Dennis Austin, Politics in Ghana: 1946-1960, 82-83.
727
Ibid.
728
Broadcast to the people of the Gold Coast and particularly members of the Trade Unions by Acting
Colonial Secretary Mr. R. H. Saloway C.I.E., O.B.E., on Thursday 5th January 1950, 1-2, press release from
Public Relations Department, Dispatch No. 8, 12th January 1950, 845K. 062/1-1250, American Consulate
Accra to Secretary of State, Washington, National Archives, Washington, U.S.A., quoted in Engwenyu,
Joseph, “The Working Class and the Politics of Constitutional Independence: The ‘Positive Action’ and the
General Strike of 1950 in the Gold Coast,” Occasional Paper, 1983.
729
Sir Arden-Clarke, “Eight Years of Transition in Ghana,” African Affairs 57, no. 226 (1958): 31-32.
730
Ibid.
731
Eric Hoffer, writing on the relationship between ideas and action, and leadership, talked about the
successive roles of leadership in the development of a movement which should be filled by different
persons for the movement to be successful but also admitted the possibility of a single individual filling all
three roles by a “change of character.” See Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (New York: The New American
Library of World Literature, 1962), and The Ordeal of Change (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).
732
Peter Abrahams, “Last Word on Nkrumah,” West African Review (October 1954).
733
“Gold Coast Constitution: address by Mr. Griffiths to Colonial Group of the Royal Empire Society,” 1
May 1951, CO 96/820/2, no 39, [225], reprinted in Ronald Hyam (ed.), British Documents on the End of
Empire. Series A, Vol. II: The Labour Government and the End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London:
HMSO, 1992), 73. The CPP had won a resounding victory in the first general election of February 8th,
1951 following the introduction of the 1950 Gold Coast constitution.
345
734
Ibid.
735
Ibid.
736
Ibid.
737
“Amendment of the Gold Coast constitution: Cabinet memorandum by Mr. Lyttelton,” 9 Feb 1952,
CAB 129/49, C(52)28, [265], reprinted in David Goldsworthy (ed.), British Documents on the End of
Empire. Series A, Vol. III: The Conservative Government and the End of Empire 1951-1957, Part 2
(London: HMSO, 1994), 186.
738
“[Nigeria]: letter from Governor Sir J Macpherson to Sir T Lloyd on the political situation in Nigeria,”
18 Jan 1952, CO 544/298, no 13, [263], reprinted in David Goldsworthy (ed.), British Documents on the
End of Empire. Series A, Vol. II: The Conservative Government and the End of Empire 1951-1957, Part 2
(London: HMSO, 1994), 183.
739
Ibid.
740
Ibid.
741
See further discussion of this crisis and Awolowo’s involvement in chapter six.
742
Governor of Nigeria to the Secretary of State, 25 January 1950, “Situation in Western Provinces,”
Supplement “A” Western Provinces Intelligence Report No. 41, December, Enclosure 1, Political Situation
in Western Nigeria, CO 537/5804, PRO.
743
That was a dire need for officialdom at this time as they faced increased and continuing conflicts in
various provinces.
744
Ife was regarded as the cradle of Yorubaland. See Samuel Johnson, History of the Yorubas: From the
Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate (London: Routledge and K. Paul, repr. 1969).
745
Governor of Nigeria to the Secretary of State, 25 January 1950, “Situation in Western Provinces,”
Supplement “A” Western Provinces Intelligence Report No. 41, December, Enclosure 1, Political Situation
in Western Nigeria, CO 537/5804, PRO.
746
Ibid.
747
The AG was already succeeding in doing so with other Yoruba Obas. The AG was composed initially
mostly of the membership in the Egbe.
748
The causes of the conflict and riots were multifaceted.
749
Situation in the Oyo province in Western Region of Nigeria, CO 554/373, PRO.
750
Governor to the Secretary of State, 30 May 1955, File Ref. 26523/1, “Disturbances at Oyo – Western
Region of Nigeria and the Removal of the Alafin,” CO 554/1236, PRO.
751
Ibid.
752
Ibid.
753
Ibid.
754
Reported in John, R Cartwright, Politics in Sierra Leone, 1947-67 (Toronto and Buffalo: University of
Toronto, 1970), 85.
755
Colonial Office Secret Document, CO 537/5807, PRO.
756
“[Gold Coast]: Minute by A B Cohen on future policy towards political and constitutional evolution,”
11 June 1951, CO 537/7181, [226], reprinted in Ronald Hyam (ed.), British Documents on the End of
Empire. Series A, Vol. II: The Labour Government and the End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London:
HMSO, 1992), 73.
757
“[West Africa]: memorandum by A B Cohen on Anglo-French relations: survey of constitutional
progress in British territories [Extract],” 20 Nov 1951, CO 537/7148, no 17, [228], reprinted in Ronald
346
Hyam (ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. II: The Labour Government and the
End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London: HMSO, 1992), 77.
758
“Amendment of the Gold Coast constitution: Cabinet memorandum by Mr. Lyttelton,” 9 Feb 1952,
CAB 129/49, C(52)28, [265], reprinted in David Goldsworthy (ed.), British Documents on the End of
Empire. Series A, Vol. III: The Conservative Government and the End of Empire 1951-1957, Part 2
(London: HMSO, 1994), 187.
759
Ibid.
760
“[Nigeria]: letter from Governor Sir J Macpherson to Sir T Lloyd on the political situation in Nigeria,”
18 Jan 1952, CO 544/298, no 13, [263], reprinted in David Goldsworthy (ed.), British Documents on the
End of Empire. Series A, Vol. III: The Conservative Government and the End of Empire 1951-1957, Part 2
(London: HMSO, 1994), 182-183.
761
See chapter seven for a discussion of these colonial radicals.
762
“[West Africa]: memorandum by A B Cohen on Anglo-French relations: survey of constitutional
progress in British territories [Extract], 20 Nov 1951,” CO 537/7148, no 17, [228], reprinted in Ronald
Hyam (ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. II: The Labour Government and the
End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London: HMSO, 1992), 78.
763
The NCNC had pushed for constitutional change to secure “greater participation in the management of
their own affairs.” It embarked on a program of positive action and toured the nation on account of its
protest and sent a delegation to England to protest against it. On 13 August, 1947, a delegation to Britain
was received by the Secretary of State, Rt. Hon. Arthur Creech Jones, in the Colonial Office. Not satisfied
with the response received from the SOS, on returning to Nigeria, NCNC members and supporters pressed
for change of demand to self government within the British Empire. See Richard L. Sklar, Nigerian
Political Parties: Power in an Emergent African Nation, 13.
764
Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Disturbances in the Gold Coast, 1948.
765
Ibid.
766
Ibid. “The Legislature was largely a Chamber of Debate,” the Commission summised.
767
“[West Africa]: memorandum by A B Cohen on Anglo-French relations: survey of constitutional
progress in British territories,” [Extract], 20 Nov 1951, CO 537/7148, no 17, [228], reprinted in Ronald
Hyam (ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. II: The Labour Government and the
End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London: HMSO, 1992), 77.
768
Ibid.
769
See discussion of NEPU in chapters seven and eight.
770
Nigerian Legislative Council Debates, 1949.
771
Ibid.
772
A. B. Cohen to Governor J. Macpherson, Secret Memo, 4 March 1949, PRO.
773
Eyo Ita was one of the members of the 1949-50 Review Committees chosen to review the 1946
constitution.
774
“Political Development in Nigeria,” CO 537/4625, PRO.
775
Such was the nature of the protest mounted by these organizations and others in the colonies, especially
the NCNC in Nigeria, against the previous Richards Constitution of 1946.
776
A. B. Cohen to Governor J. Macpherson, ‘Secret Memo’ 4 March 1949, PRO.
777
These new elements were brought in to secure the base of the conservative coalition groups within the
Northern political party, the Northern People’s Congress (NPC), and to give it the semblance of a more
modern, liberal organization. Tafawa Balewa would later become the first Prime Minister of independent
Nigeria in 1960 and would be assassinated in the first Nigerian military coup of 1966.
347
778
NEPU Memo to the Secretary of State, July 1952, NEPU Papers.
779
“Northern Political Body Pleads For Cooperation & Rights Of Representation,” Extract from Comet,
30/9/50, in NEPU Papers.
780
This was similar to what was occurring in the North of Nigeria.
781
I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson, MP, Sierra Leone Legislative Council, and Organizing Secretary, West
African Civil Liberties and National Defence League, “Sierra Leone Constitution,” in CO 554/252, 195152, 10, PRO.
782
Ibid. Elections were only representative and democratic in the colony of Sierra Leone, he remarked. It
was also through the colony’s National Council party that he was able to enter the Sierra Leone legislature.
783
Ibid. He had a meeting with representatives of the Colonial Office on 9 April, 1952 and afterwards
issued the statements regarding his views of, and objections to the 1951 Constitution and political
developments in Sierra Leone.
784
Undated letter by the Ogbonis in Ransome Kuti Papers.
785
Ibid.
786
Ibid.
787
Ibid.
788
Ibid.
789
Eyo Ita was one of those representing the NCNC as a member of the Constitutional Review Committee
at the Constitutional Review Conferences in 1949-50. He was a graduate of Columbia University in the U.
S.
790
Mbonu Ojike was also a co-signatory to the report but the author was principally Eyo Ita.
791
“Minority Report,” in “Political Development of Nigeria, 1950,” CO 537/5786, PRO.
792
Ibid.
793
Ibid.
794
Ibid. This was also reminiscent of Wallace-Johnson’s arguments in the 1930s in regard to the Western
Imperial Powers’ involvement of the colonies in international wars.
795
Ibid. See chapter seven for exploration of the NEPU and Hajiyya Sawaba activism in the North of
Nigeria.
796
Ibid.
797
Ibid.
798
Ibid.
799
Ibid.
800
This formed one of the major issues at the October 6, 1939 Carleton Hotel Conference between colonial
officials and prominent university scholars. See CO 847/17/47135, PRO.
801
“Political Development of Nigeria, 1950,” Minority Report, in CO 537/5786, PRO.
802
Ibid.
803
Ibid.
804
Ibid. Nigeria had since gaining full sovereignty been continually split into many states as means of
further democratization of the country and towards more equitable distribution of resources.
805
Ibid.
806
Ibid.
348
807
Ibid.
808
Ibid.
809
To Sir T. Lloyd from Mr. Cohen, “Political Development of Nigeria, 10.5.50,” in CO 537/5786, PRO.
Chapter 6
810
In seeking to provide better analytical insight into the notion of groupness, Brubaker distinguishes
between “groups” and “categories” and seeks to problematize the relations between them as well as the
process through which he believes categories get invested with groupness. The project of group-making,
he writes, involves a social, cultural, and political project aimed at transforming categories into groups or
increasing levels of groupness. See Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups, 10-13.
811
Eley and Suny have remarked that most successful nationalisms presume some prior community of
territory, language, or culture (the “objective” basis) which provide the raw materials for the intellectual
project of nationality (i.e., the “subjective” basis), linked to political intervention, new ideologies, and
cultural change. See, Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996), 9.
812
Dudley’s interview with Alhaji Ladan Baki, quoted in B. J. Dudley, Parties and Politics in Northern
Nigeria (London: Cass, 1968), 181.
813
The 1953 Kano crisis is examined in a later section of this chapter.
814
The on-going constitutional changes also involved changes in resource allocation and in the power of
the purse by whichever African political party controlled the regional power base.
815
Brubaker has noted that categories of ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, those he called specialists in ethnicity
who may live “off” as well as for “ethnicity,” are for doing. Roger Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups.
816
Peel explored in-depth, in the case of a Yoruba sub-national group, the Ijeshas of Western Nigeria, the
changing structural conditions in which new identities of interests were being formed and political action
undertaken. See his excellent study, J. D. Y. Peel, Ijeshas and Nigerians: The Incorporation of a Yoruba
Kingdom 1890s-1970s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
817
Socially-relevant conflicts of interest would become collapsed into nationally-relevant conflicts of
interests without the resolution, or effective resolution of the former.
818
In expectation of the changes towards some form of parliamentary government and the grant of more
power to Africans based on the division of the country into regions, new political organizations were
created based on regional and ethnic identification, such as the Action Group (AG) and the Northern
Peoples Congress (NPC) in Nigeria, the Protectorate Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) and the Freetown
Creole National Council (NC) in Sierra Leone.
819
S. Odulana and others, mimeographed invitation of 14 February 1951, in Bello Abasi’s Papers, cited in
Kenneth W. J. Post and George D. Jenkins, The Price of Liberty: Personality and Politics in Colonial
Nigeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 79.
820
“Resolution of the Ibadan Progressive Union (Youth Group) on the Native Settlers’ Resolution on the
Ibadan and District Native Authority (Alienation of Land to Strangers) Rules 1949,” printed, n.d., cited in
Kenneth W. J. Post and George D. Jenkins, The Price of Liberty: Personality and Politics in Colonial
Nigeria, 79.
821
J. D. Y. Peel, Ijeshas and Nigerians: The Incorporation of a Yoruba Kingdom, 1890s-1970s, 186.
822
It also presents a good example of the complex and contradictory nature of social struggles and
discourses in these colonial formations and of how crisis in one sphere, in this case, chieftaincy crisis,
precipitated crisis and change in other spheres. It further reveals how the conflicts between competing
power holders and aspirant power holders became reconstituted in nationality terms, i.e., in terms of the
349
Ibadan, a sub-nationality group of the Yoruba cultural group, versus non Ibadans, especially other Yoruba
sub-nationality groups such as the Ijebus and the Egbas.
823
Different issues and interests came to surround this conflict. What started in Ibadan in 1949 as
essentially a conflict between the old and the new nobility in the agitation against Agbaje, the Otun
Balogun, one of important Ibadan chiefs, turned out to be more complex as it was soon joined by other
causes and became expression of other antagonisms and issues, many of which were inherently mutuallyconflicting. Like many social movements in different localities in this period, it also became a symbol of
many forms of discontent in Ibadan and was quickly associated with the whole range of problems
confronting Ibadan and the antagonisms surrounding the issue of local reforms, as well as with the politics
of those seeking political power at the regional and national level.
824
For an in-depth study and valuable account of this crisis, see Kenneth W. J. Post and George D. Jenkins,
The Price of Liberty: Personality and Politics in Colonial Nigeria. The basic information on this crisis
derives from Post & Jenkins’ account.
825
The Olubadan was the highest Native Authority post in Ibadan, the equivalent of the colonial chief.
826
The Western-educated Africans had also started to take on chieftaincy titles at this time as means of
increasing their power.
827
Kenneth W. J. Post and George D. Jenkins, The Price of Liberty: Personality and Politics in Colonial
Nigeria.
828
Ibid., 56.
829
The anti-Agbaje forces included the reigning Olubadan, lesser chiefs, the Maiyegun League which was
formed initially to protest government cutting of diseased cocoa trees, Muslim leaders, young men who had
felt excluded by the wealthier native Ibadans from new opportunities, etc. Other more personal and
individual interests were also involved, as epitomized in the case of Adegoke Adelabu who got involved in
the struggle primarily for the purpose of capturing the coveted proposed position of Administrative
Secretary of the Ibadan local government which the colonial administration was putting forward at that
time. This was part of the administrative changes on-going in local government. Adelabu joined the plot
against Agbaje in December, 1949 by offering his skill in western literacy to help draft the petition that was
filed to remove Agbaje from the ranks of the chiefs, hoping to be rewarded for his services with the post of
Administrative Secretary, but failed in the end to get it. Bello Abasi, the son of the previous Olubadan
Aleshinloye, got involved with the new political society, the Ibadan Welfare Committee, primarily his
organizational weapon against Agbaje, out of a personal grudge against Agbaje.
830
Post and Jenkins, The Price of Liberty, 58.
831
Ibid.
832
Ibid.
833
Governor of Nigeria to the Secretary of State, “Situation in Western Provinces,” 25 January 1950, CO
537/5804, PRO.
834
Ibid.
835
Ibid.
836
Ibid.
837
Both the Alaperu and the Ologere partially admitted to the truth of the allegations brought against them.
At the meeting of 18 December, 1949, the Obas were reprimanded by the delegates and agreed to the terms
of settlement. For the Alaperu, it included: decision by the Alaperu not to preside over the Iperu Native
Court except in cases of appeals, the removal from his household the two wives the Alaperu had allegedly
seduced from members of the Majeobaje, the release of the communal lands given to the Alaperu’s family,
and Iperu court members to report to the Alaperu both on going to court and on their return. The terms for
the Ologere were similar to those of the Alaperu with the addition that the Ologere should not settle
350
disputes by himself but in conjunction with his chiefs. From the Governor Nigeria to the Secretary of
State, “Situation in Western Provinces,” 25 January 1950.
838
The Egbe was transformed into the Action Group (AG) political party in 1950.
839
See chapter four for a discussion of the AWU’s conflict with the Alake.
840
This is examined a little further below.
841
Chief Oladoke Akintola was and remained a controversial and fascinating figure in the history of
Nigeria. He had been described in various ways as “razor-witted,” “uncompromisingly wily,” “complex,
multifaceted, almost unfathomable politician,” etc. He was born in 1910 at Ogbomosho in Oshun Division.
In 1943, he became the editor of the Daily Service, then the official organ of the NYM. In 1946, he went to
England to study public administration and law. He was active in the formation of the Action Group (AG)
and in the agitation of Oshun Division for separation from the Ibadan divisional government. Throughout
the decade prior to Nigeria’s independence, he represented the AG at the national level of Nigeria’s
government as Central Minister of Labor (1952-1953), Leader of the Opposition in the Federal House of
Representatives (1954-1957), and Federal Minister of Commerce and Aviation in the national government
of 1957-1959. In 1953, he was chosen as Deputy Leader of the Action Group. Akintola became Premier
of the Western Region in the First Republic. In 1962, a rift occurred between him and Awolowo, the leader
of the AG party, causing a split in the party and led Akintola to form a new party, the Nigerian national
Democratic Party (NNDP), in alliance with the ruling NPC party. He was murdered in the military coup
of January 15, 1966 that toppled Nigeria’s first Republic.
842
The AG Universal Primary Education (UPE) program is examined a little further below.
843
For a classic historical account, see, Samuel Johnson, The History of the Yorubas: from the Earliest
Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate. (London: Routledge and K. Paul, repr. 1969).
844
For excellent accounts of the fratricidal internecine warfare and political realignments among the
Yorubas in the 19th century, see J. F. Ade Ajayi and R. S. Smith, Yoruba Warfare in the 19th Century
(London: Cambridge University Press, 1964), and S. A. Akintoye, Revolution and Power Politics in
Yorubaland 1840-1893 (London: Longman, 1971).
845
An example was the conflict between Ilesha and Ife, centered on the former’s resentment at its
administrative subordination to Ife in the colonial state’s administrative rearrangements.
846
See Richard L. Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties: Power in an Emergent African Nation.
847
Ibid.
848
Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire into the Fears of Minorities and the Means of Allaying
them. Cmnd. 505, London, 1958.
849
See Ahmed, Beita Yusuf, A Freedom Fighter: Annotated Memoirs of Mallam Illah Ringim (Sokoto,
Nigeria: Sidi Umaru Press, 1978). Ringim is discussed at length in chapter seven.
850
The Uthman Dan Fodio jihad of the 19th century effectively put power in the hands of the invading
aristocratic Fulanis of which Dan Fodio was one and who took over much of the region and ruled them as
emirates. It was on this structure that the Lugardian Indirect Rule system was superimposed with hardly
much change of the power structure except for the native rulers to recognize the overall sovereignty of the
British. The inegalitarianism inscribed within the Fulani emirate system was left intact and survived in
important forms to be reproduced in the NPC party which was composed mostly of members of the ruling
Northern Native Authorities.
851
See discussions of NEPU in chapters seven and eight.
852
Roger Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups.
853
Ibid. He also notes that such performative, group-making practices are not specific to ethnic
entrepreneurs, but generic to political mobilization and representation.
854
Report of the Kano Disturbances: 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th May, 1953, Nigerian National Archive. The
riot occurred as a result of the AG Party's attempt to canvass for electoral votes in this city. NPC Party
351
officials were instrumental in manipulating the symbols of religion among the people against the Southern
Parties.
855
Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
856
Women were imagined as dependent, not sovereign, and as reproducers, the “mothers of the nation.”
857
The Sardauna was believed to have been the direct descendant of Uthman Dan Fodi who led the Islamic
jihad in the North of Nigeria in the 19th century and created the Sokoto Caliphate, Sokoto being the capital.
Ahmadu Bello became the President-General of the NPC when it was launched as a full-fledged political
organization in 1952. In 1960, he became Premier of the North at Nigeria’s independence and was killed in
the 1966 Nigerian military coup d’etat.
858
“Oppositions, Republicanism, and Votes for Women,” West Africa, 1962.
859
Sir Ahmadu Bello, My Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962).
860
“Oppositions, Republicanism, and Votes for Women,” West Africa, 1962.
861
Ibid.
862
Ahmadu Bello, My Life. The subordination and near total physical invisibility of women was at its most
intense in the Sardauna’s Islamic Northern Nigeria’s social and political culture; the veil put on by Moslem
women - and the purdah itself - are symbolic of this invisibility.
863
See chapter five for examination of this report.
864
See discussion of contrasting discourse of gender by women radicals in chapter seven.
865
I recall repeated reference to this program in popular discourse during my teaching tenure at the
University of Ibadan, Ibadan, now in Oyo State, Nigeria.
866
For detailed and well-written account of the UPE program in Southern Nigeria, see, David B.
Abernathy, The Political Dilemma of Popular Education: An African Case (Stanford, California: Stanford
University Press, 1969). The basic information on the UPE program follows closely on Abernathy’s
account.
867
This was consequent to the victory of AG in the election that took place after the 1951 Macpherson
Constitution was introduced. Awolowo became the Premier of Western Region in October 1954.
868
David B. Abernathy, The Political Dilemma of Popular Education: An African Case, 127.
869
The AG also perceived its UPE program as very noteworthy and described it so in glowing terms. The
government’s commemorative brochure published to mark the occasion of the program when the first
school year began in the West in January 1955 referred to it as “the beginning in this country of a social
revolution” and quoted Awokoya’s earlier description of it as “a gilt-edged security against the hazards and
difficulties of the coming years.” The seriousness and gravity with which the AG party leaders held this
program is further reflected in the statement of the Minister of Education who regarded the proposals for
educational development as “imperative and urgent,” to be “treated as a national emergency, second only to
war,” and also to be moved with “the momentum of a revolution.” And the AG did initially try to treat it as
such. Notwithstanding the relative increased resources of the Western Regional government and the
sincere commitment of the AG party leaders to the program, the demands on the government’s financial
and other resources when the program was put into operation proved more than any of the government was
able to meet as projected and as planned. The proposals of both parties had generated great interest among
the populace in both regions, since all saw Western education on which the schools’ curriculum was based
as the main avenue to status, wealth and power. The turnout when the program first started in the West in
January 1955 resulted in more pupils than projected. As Abernathy records, the program had to be scaled
down in course of time to make it administratively and financially feasible as reality set in. The AG had to
impose taxation in order to offset the cost of paying for the UPE program soon after. This cost the AG
politically, initially, as people were at first resistant to being taxed for this. It cost the AG the loss of seats
in the November 1954 elections to the Federal House of Representatives. The NCNC exploited the AG’s
352
unpopular tax in the Western Region to gain more seats in that region. The AG recovered in the end as
people became more understanding and receptive to paying the modest levy once they began to enjoy the
results of government-financed primary education, giving the AG some degree of popularity which was
reflected in its gains in the polls in the 1956 regional election. Abernathy, The Political Dilemma of
Popular Education: An African Case.
870
The AG had a more principled commitment to this provision than the NCNC which could be seen to be
playing politics by seeking to compete with the AG on this account, introducing the program in the East in
1957, two years after the start of it in the West. AG legislators and party executives, many of whom were
Western-educated and many of whom were also educationists, had been giving attention to the issue of
education even before the AG party was created and before they went into active politics. In the late 1940s,
an informal study group composed of these educators had met regularly at Ibadan to discuss what a
Nigerian educational policy should be, should the British leave the country. The AG’s 1951 policy paper
on education and the 1952 Awokoya proposals emerged from the deliberations of this group. The group
included Chief T. T. Solaru, Canon E. O. Alayande, M. A. Ajasin, Canon S. A. Adeyefa, and S. O.
Awokoya, all of whom became prominent in the AG and may be considered principal architects of the
West’s educational policy in the early 1950’s. Abernathy, The Political Dilemma of Popular Education:
An African Case, 138.
871
Obafemi Awolowo, Voice of Reason (Akure, Nigeria: Fagbamigbe Publishers, 1981), 163.
872
Obafemi Awolowo, Action Group’s 14-Point Programme (Lagos: Amalgamated Press of Nigeria,
1959), 3.
873
Obafemi O. Awolowo, The People’s Republic (Ibadan, Nigeria: Oxford University Press, 1968), 311.
874
Ibid.
875
Obafemi Awolowo, Thoughts on Nigeria Constitution (Ibadan, Nigeria: Oxford University Press:
Ibadan, 1966), 112-113. In 1976, Nigeria began Free Primary Education program nationally and included
the goal of free education at all levels in her Constitution in 1979.
876
UPN Directorate, U. P. N. Policy Papers, 6.
877
The NCNC and the CPP which at their founding were more open to popular concerns did not prove to
be different from other mainstream parties by this period.
878
Some of the notable cases involve dissensions with the radical Zikists, and the controversies over the
African Continental Bank (ACB) affair in which the colonial government indicted Azikiwe for
mismanagement of the bank. See chapter five for discussion of Azikiwe’s dissensions with the Zikists. For
the ACB controversies, see discussion in Richard Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties: Power in an Emergent
African Nation, 143-189.
879
As noted earlier in chapter five, Azikiwe already publicly indicated his acceptance of the federalist
constitution for Nigeria before his party even met to discuss and approve a change of position towards the
federalist constitution for Nigeria and to formally accept it.
880
Richard Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties: Power in an Emergent African Nation.
881
The views of those disenchanted with their political party and with the party president and who resigned
from them may not be altogether disinterested.
882
Abernathy attributed his resignation to the fact that he was not expected to be put forward as the
Minister for Education in the next election, as well as to his unfulfilled desire to have his stamp on the UPE
program of which he was more or less the main intellectual architect. David B. Abernathy, The Political
Dilemma of Popular Education: An African Case.
883
Awokoya, for example, who was from the same Ijebu-Yoruba sub-group as Awolowo, was hoping to
draw political support from the same constituency as Awolowo with whom he was in disagreement.
884
The AG did lose out in a few cases for taking such steps. In Abeokuta, the AG supported the return of
the Alake without addressing the issues that had led to his deposition.
353
885
Reports on the Political Situation in the Oyo Province in Western Region, Nigeria, 6 Nov. 1953, CO
554/373, PRO.
886
Awolowo, the AG leader was, however, cautious as to the boundaries of the conflicts with the Alafin.
He did not want to see the total demise of the Alafin, as a Yoruba Oba, because of how it would affect the
support AG was already gaining among some Yoruba chiefs. As he did with these pro-AG Yoruba chiefs,
Awolowo only wanted to go as far as capturing the base of power of these chiefs, and thus their
constituencies, but not to destroy them and the symbol of chieftaincy – much like the colonial authority
also tried to use the colonial chiefs! Awolowo knew he could not afford to lose the support of the other
Obas and preferred to see the Alafin “knocked down” instead and set up again on terms to suit the AG.
The tension between the extreme group led by Bode Thomas and the rest of the party on account of this
crisis was already threatening the unity of the party and there were signs that the Obas in the AG party were
becoming increasingly restless about toeing the party line on account of the AG/Bode Thomas struggle
with the Alafin of Oyo, a fellow Oba. Four of the Obas, the Oba of Benin, the Olubadan of Ibadan, the
Alake of Abeokuta, and the Oba Adele of Lagos, were said to be showing signs of rebellion. See Extracts,
“Situation in Western Provinces,” 13th September – 14 October, 1953 and “Reports on the Political
Situation in the Oyo Province in Western Region, Nigeria, 6 Nov. 1953,” CO 554/373, PRO.
887
W. J. M. Mackenzie, and Kenneth Robinson, eds., Five Elections in Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1960).
888
It led to the “struggle for the second independence.”
889
Officialdom’s “rush” to relinquish empire is discussed in chapter eight, the concluding chapter.
890
See his lengthy report in “Minority Reports,” Political Developments of Nigeria, 1950, CO 537/5786,
PRO.
891
Ibid.
892
Mokwugo Okoye, A Letter to Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe: a Dissent Remembered (Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth
Dimension Publishing Co, 1979), 92.
Chapter Seven
893
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 7.
894
Pobee Biney was a socialist-oriented labor leader and activist in the Gold Coast.
895
Anthony Woode was also a socialist-oriented labor leader and activist in the Gold Coast.
896
Nduka Eze was one of the four initiators of the Zikist Movement in Lagos in 1946. The Zikist
Movement and aspects of Eze’s career as a trade union leader and political activist are discussed a little
further below and in chapter eight.
897
Raji Abdallah was an Igbirra from the Middle Belt area of the country. In 1945, he formed the African
Anti-Colour Bar Movement (ABM) with Osita Agwuna. In 1947, he merged the ABM with the Zikist
Movement for a broader national front and became president of the Zikist Movement the same year.
898
Mokwugo Okoye was the General Secretary of the Zikist Movement. He was convicted of sedition for
having revolutionary pamphlets in his possession and was sentenced to 33 months in prison. West African
Pilot, March 7th, 1950. He was released in 1953 and returned to the NCNC Youth Association. In 1955,
he was expelled from the NCNC, readmitted in 1956 and became the Secretary-General of the Youth
Association as well as a member of the National Executive Committee (NEC). Okoye was author of
several pamphlets which espoused revolutionary socialism and freedom. See his memoir, Mokwugo
Okoye, Storms on the Niger (Enugu, Nigeria: Eastern Nigeria Printing Corporation, 1967).
899
Osita C. Agwuna was in the civil service at Kano, Northern Nigeria and formed the African Anti-Color
Bar Movement with Raji Abdallah in 1945. In 1947, he became Vice President of the Zikist Movement.
354
He became General Secretary of the short-lived CPP of Nigeria (chapter eight touches on the CPP of
Nigeria), and later became NCNC member of the Federal House of Representatives for Awka Division.
900
Michael Imoudu was a trade unionist from Auchi, Nigeria and President of the Railway Workers’ Union
in Nigeria and rose to fame as “Nigerian Labor Leader No. 1” when he led the 1945 General Strike of
railway workers in Lagos. He was deported by the colonial government from Lagos to his hometown of
Auchi on account of his participation in the strike as a “potential threat to public safety.” Imoudu was one
of those involved in the NCNC pan-Nigeria tour in opposition to the 1946 Richard’s Constitution. In 1948,
he was appointed by Azikiwe into the NCNC Cabinet along with Nduka Eze and F. O. Coker. He also
became the president of the leftwing-oriented Nigerian Federation of Labor (NNFL) and the Nigerian
Labor Congress which was also under leftist leadership. For some useful works on Michael Imoudu, see,
for example, Wale Oyemakinde, “Michael Imoudu and the Emergence of Militant Trade Unionism in
Nigeria, 1940-42,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 7, no. 1 (December, 1974): 541-561. Other
valuable references on Imoudu include. Robin Cohen, “Nigeria’s Labour Leader No.1. Notes for a
Biographical Study of M. A. O. Imoudu,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 5, no. 2 (June, 1970):
303-308, Wogu Ananaba, The Trade Union Movement in Nigeria (Apapa, Lagos: Times Press Limited,
1969), and Richard Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
1963). In my interview with Michael Imoudu, conducted in Lagos, August 1990, he lamented what he
perceived to be the demise of the labor movement in Nigeria.
901
Hajiyya Sawaba Gambo was born in 1933. Her mother was from Nupe, Nigeria and her father was from
the Gold Coast. Author’s interview with Sawaba, August 11, 1990, Zaria, Nigeria.
902
Ringim was a poet, social analyst, political activist, orator, and a freedom fighter who lived and
practiced chiefly as a Koranic scholar. See his biographical accounts also in Ahmed, Beita Yusuf, A
Freedom Fighter: Annotated Memoirs of Mallam Illah Ringim (Sokoto, Nigeria: Sidi Umaru Press, 1978)
903
Mallam Lawan Dambazair was a versatile poet and legal adviser to NEPU in Northern Nigeria.
904
Muda Spikin Darma was born in 1920. He was publicity secretary of the Northern Peoples’ Congress
from which he and the other NEPU militants subsequently broke off. He led the dissenting body within the
Congress before the break. He was a trader as well as a poet and lived in Kano but traveled around the
Northern cities giving lectures on the subject of unity in Nigeria. NEPU Papers, Nigeria Archive.
905
The “class” component of radical discourse is critiqued in later sections of this chapter.
906
These include the heritage of earlier millennium and indigenous Christian revolt movements in the
colonies.
907
It could be deemed somewhat that Marxism-Leninism provided for colonials exposed to Western
education, mostly products of mission schools and Christian churches, the equivalent of a Christian
theology of revolution to that of the Islamic Jihad (Holy War). Liberation theology in the second half of
the twentieth century in places such as South Africa and in many Latin American states and elsewhere was
partly rooted in Marxism.
908
In the ideal sense, their vision of social change approximates to the Trotskyist socialist concept of the
permanent revolution (the Leninist “double revolution”), involving the simultaneous resolution of social
and political issues in one political action. Though not in any way Trotskyist or communist, colonial
radicals sought to effect social change at a time of political change, when the changes being proposed in the
new constitutions at the turn of the 50s seemed to promise such changes.
909
Colonial Office Secret Document, CO 537/5807, PRO. See discussion of this shift in chapter five. As
also revealed in chapter five, Azikiwe and others like him had similarly been making strategic shifts and
reinventing themselves as partners worth working with.
910
This was the view expressed to the Secretary of State by a member of the Gold Coast mines’ interest
groups, using the familiar imperialist’s label and with which the SOS was in agreement. See,
Memorandum for the Secretary of State, Enclosure 4, Private and Personal, in “Gold Coast Representatives
against Constitutional Advancement,” 1951-52, 13, CO 554/252, PRO.
355
911
It was, however, precisely because these changes were perceived by the social radicals to circumscribe
desired grassroot and democratic changes across the board that made them insistent on pursuing their goals
of social change.
912
As examined in chapter five, the new constitutional provisions allowed Nkrumah to become elected into
the Gold Coast Legislative and Executive Councils and Azikiwe headed the Eastern Region of Nigeria as
Premier.
913
See further discussion and documentation of Nkrumah’s and Azikiwe’s statements and actions to this
effect below and in chapter eight.
914
Wallace-Johnson had been able to enter the Sierra Leone legislature where he carried on his radical
critique after the 1951 election in Sierra Leone, first as a National Council (NC) party representative and
subsequently as an Independent member for Wilberforce and York Electoral District, Freetown after
quitting the NC in 1952, and then as a United Sierra Leone Progressive Party (UPP) representative until
after the 1957 election when he quit the UPP. Part of the social radicals’ predisposition towards resorting
to extra-institutional means of protest was also because of the exclusion of many of them from these
representative institutions. See discussion of this in later sections.
915
This was at the 1949/50 Nigerian General Conference for the review of the 1946 Richard’s constitution
and in anticipation of the proposed Macpherson constitution which was passed into law in 1951. See
chapter five for a discussion of some of the objections recorded in his minority report.
916
The Zikists and the Zikists movement are discussed below and in chapter eight.
917
Mokwugo Okoye, Storms on the Niger, 142.
918
Ibid.
919
These colonial radicals lacked thorough grasp of Marxism-Leninism as a revolutionary theoretical
schema or blueprint as well as of its weaknesses and limitations.
920
West Africa, August 25, 1962, 935. The “new doctrine” was in reference to Marxism-Leninism. The
“new facts” relate to their ability to subsequently see and understand the structural context of imperial rule,
etc., and its drawbacks.
921
Ibid. Ex-servicemen were also among the militant rank and file of the CPP in the Gold Coast and were
at the forefront of the 1948 Gold Coast disturbances.
922
In general, colonialism led to women’s diminished status and roles and undermined what had been
strong women’s political and economic status in many pre-colonial African societies. As studies have
shown, erstwhile strong women’s political organizations, deriving in part from the dual sex system, were
undermined during colonialism. See, for example, Bolanle Awe, ed., Nigerian Women in Historical
Perspective (Ibadan, Nigeria: Sankore Publishers, 1992), and K. Okonjo, “The Dual Sex Political System in
Operation: Igbo Women and Community Politics in Midwestern Nigeria,” in Women in Africa: Studies in
Social and Economic Change, eds., N. J. Hafkin and E. G. Bay, 45–58 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1976).
923
As studies have shown, colonial rule actively excluded women from political power and deepened their
social and economic subordination to male elders and patriarchal kinship groups. The colonial state,
especially in the first half of the twentieth century, was antagonistic towards African women’s diverse
interests and relied on women for reproductive and agricultural production and as cheap source of labor.
Exclusionary measures were enacted such as exclusive property rights to men in order to ensure women’s
labor in the home and on the land.
924
The removal of marriage restrictions by the colonial courts was leading to increased adultery, divorce,
and fluid marriage practices that undermined the position of traditional power holders and became part of
the crises in local African society. The colonial state and African patriarchs would collude to control
women’s burgeoning autonomy through a series of legal enactments, such as new marriage laws and travel
restrictions, that curtailed women’s activities in various spheres. Walsh and Scully remark that the
collusion between the colonial state and elder men meant that both local and national forms were
356
patriarchal. See Denise Walsh and Pamela Scully, “Altering Politics, Contesting Gender,” Journal of
Southern African Studies 32, no. 1 (March 2006): 4. Women radicals sought to change gender norms and
dismantle the axis of patriarchy which was reinforced in the collusion between the colonial state (white
male colonial officials), and African cultural producers and political entrepreneurs, i.e., African chiefly and
liberal, Western-educated men. This undermined the otherwise limited emancipatory aspects of
colonialism on African women.
925
This was extensively used, for example, in the 1929 Aba Women’s War and in the Abeokuta Women’s
Movement. The AWU women in their protest demonstrations against the Alake and their March on the
Alake’s palace in 1947 sang songs worded in terms of female’s genital organs. For the Aba Women’s War,
see for example, Misty, L. Bastian, “Vultures of the Marketplace: Southeastern Nigerian Women and
Discourses of the Ogu Umunwaanyi (Women’s War) of 1929,” in Jean Allman, Susan Geiger, and
Nakanyike Musisi, edits., Women in African Colonial Histories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2002).
926
See John Akileye, “All Songs Sung During the Women Union’s Demonstration, from 8/12/47 to
15/9/48,” 5, in The March (Oro Ritual) on Alake’s Palace, Ransome Kuti Papers.
927
It was applied in socially emancipatory ways among women radicals.
928
In India, widow burning or sati, a regional and quite limited practice constituted by the British as a
national crime of shame perpetrated by men against all Indian women, was redeemed in the anti-colonial
struggle by male nationalists who reinscribed it as a long-standing culture and invoked it as an honorable
act!
929
See, Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965).
930
For some valuable studies, see, for example, L. Thomas, The Politics of the Womb: Women,
Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), and C. A.
Presley, Kikuyu Women, the Mau Mau Rebellion, and Social Change in Kenya (Boulder, C: Westview,
1992).
931
See chapters four and eight for the examination of, and more detailed discussions of FRK-led AWU
movement in Southern Nigeria.
932
See, LaRay Denzer, “Draft of Documents Related to the Sierra Leone Women's Movement.” Undated.
Much of the information on Cummings-John is derived from Denzer's biographical work on her which she
made available to me while her work was in progress during one of my research trips in Nigeria.
933
She believed religion should be left in the private realm. Author’s personal interview with Sawaba
Gambo at her residence in Zaria, August 8, 1990.
934
Ibid.
935
Sir Ahmadu Bello, “Oppositions, Republicanism, and Votes for Women,” West Africa, 1962.
936
Personal interview with Sawaba Gambo at her residence in Zaria, August 8, 1990. On the day of the
interview, she was also having one of the many rallies in support of a new political party she was helping to
establish. That year, she was Leader of the Presidential Monitory Team of the Directorate for Food, Road
and Rural Infrastructure (DIFRI). She said the then Nigerian military president, General Ibrahim
Babangida, called on her periodically for political advice. Sawaba died a few years later, mostly unsung
for someone who staked so much to realize a free and democratic society for all citizens.
937
Ibid.
938
She noted that women were too timid and too afraid of going to prison to participate in social protest
activities. She said that men threatened their wives with divorce or with being driven out of their homes if
they supported her. Personal interview with Sawaba Gambo at her residence in Zaria, August 8, 1990.
939
Ibid.
940
Leather cane.
941
Personal interview with Sawaba Gambo at her residence in Zaria, August 8, 1990.
357
942
Ibid.
943
See chapters four and eight for more detailed account of FRK’s discourses and practices.
944
Cummings-John broke ranks with the uppity Creoles of Sierra Leone who were of the same social
background as she was to reach out to the Protectorate People who the Creoles looked down upon.
945
“Abeokuta: Is All Well,” Editorial, Western Echo, February 9th, 1948.
946
LaRay Denzer, “Draft of Documents Related to the Sierra Leone Women's Movement.” Undated.
947
The other Creole elites, on their part, felt betrayed by Cummings-John’s decision to join the SLPP. See
John R. Cartwright, Politics in Sierra Leone, 1947–67 (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto, 1970).
948
I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson, “Sierra Leone Constitution,” CO 554/252, 1951-52, PRO. He had made a trip
to Britain in 1952 in connection with what he regarded as the most glaring anomalies of the 1951
Constitution in Sierra Leone.
949
It should be noted, however, that the logic of successfully achieving the AWU’s goals at the time also
dictated cooperation with the NCNC which was against the return of the exiled Alake against whom FRK
remained opposed, unlike the Awolowo-led Egbe and AG which actively helped in the Alake’s return in
1949. The AG, ideologically positioned on the sustenance of chiefs and chieftaincy rule, albeit under their
control, was in support of the return and reinstatement of Alake Ademola that the AWU wanted out of
power, and out of town.
950
See chapter four for discussion of this.
951
See Denzer, “Draft of Documents Related to the Sierra Leone Women's Movement.” and, “The
Influence of Pan-Africanism in the Political Career of Constance A. Cummings-John,” March 1, 1984,
Seminar Paper, History Department, University of Ibadan.
952
The IASB was founded by Black Marxist Pan-Africanists in London in May, 1937 with the aim of
coordinating activities of grassroot organizations in the colonies into a broad-based movement for increased
participation in the colonies’ administration and for independence.
953
The ACAA is reported to have been placed on the list of subversive organizations by the U.S. Attorney
General in 1947 because of alleged communist connections. See LaRay Denzer, “The Influence of PanAfricanism in the Political Career of Constance A, Cummings-John.”
954
Ibid.
955
Ibid.
956
Report of what went on in the WIDFA was provided to Funlayo Ransome Kuti in a letter to her from the
Nigerian male delegate, Mr. Theos Ogunkoya, who had represented her organization at the WIDFA
Conference. See the letter from T. O. Ogunkoya to Mrs. F. Kuti, 5th September, 1949 in Ransome Kuti
Papers.
957
“’Resolution,’ Nigerian Women's Union Meeting, 2.15.1949,” Ransome Kuti Papers.
958
Denzer, “The Influence of Pan-Africanism in the Political Career of Constance A, Cummings-John,” 15.
959
Beaming with delight, she described herself as a social radical in her reminiscences of her activism in
Northern Nigeria during the 50s. Author’s interview with Sawaba Hajiyya Gambo.
960
See, for example, Eyo Ita’s and Mbonu Ojike’s Minority Report following the Constitutional Review
Conference in 1949 in which they participated, in ‘“Minority Report,’ Political Development of Nigeria,
1950,” CO 537/5786, PRO.
961
Walsh and Scully noted some rare exceptions, like the Federation of South African Women (FSAW)
that emerged in South Africa in 1954 to fight apartheid and to bring women together across racial lines; the
FSAW fought for women’s rights and famously led an anti-pass campaign in which 20, 000 women
protested. See Denise Walsh and Pamela Scully, “Altering Politics, Contesting Gender,” Journal of
Southern African Studies 32, no. 1 (March 2006): 5.
358
962
G. Geisler, Women and the Remaking of Politics in Southern Africa: Negotiating Autonomy,
Incorporation and Representation (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2004), 55.
963
These involved their promptings of international organizations, development agencies, and wealthy
nations to encourage countries around the globe to enhance women’s role in development, improve
women’s legal standing and their presence in governmental structures, etc.
964
See some discussion of these in relation to the AWU in chapter four.
965
“Aurevoir, Lioness of Egba,” Daily Times, April 27th, 1978.
966
Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration, 306.
967
The information on NEPU is derived mainly from primary documents on NEPU and about NEPU I
retrieved from the Nigerian archive during my research there. These materials afford some fresh analytical
insights into this movement as attempted in this study. They include documentation of official perceptions
of NEPU as “extremist” and “communist,” as well as what the radicals in NEPU were saying and doing
with categories of religion, gender, class, etc., and about the “nation.”
968
Salman Rushdie's most polemic book, The Satanic Verses, could be said to be, in part, a modern-day
literary response and critique within Islam to such perceived inegalitarianism, as well as reactionary
elements in Islam. It belongs to no known schools of Islamic thought. See Salman Rushdie, The Satanic
Verses (New York, NY: Viking, 1989). Others before him had also tried to pose the same challenge to
Islam, from a different mode, particularly against Islamic regimes as in the Sudan, for example, and had
been killed for doing so.
969
It was an offshoot of the defunct Northern Element Progressive Association (NEPA) which was formed
in 1947. Aminu Kano was one of NEPU’s founders and became its life president.
970
Conservatives and moderates within the NPC secured the adoption of a resolution to the effect that no
member of the NEPU could remain as a member of the NPC. The NEPU’s wing of the Kano delegation
thereupon broke with the NPC and the NPC was thereafter converted into a political party for the use of
conservative politicians. See Richard L. Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties: Power in an Emergent African
Nation, 95-96.
971
For detailed and firsthand account of the establishment and official rationale of the Indirect Rule system
in Northern Nigeria and in Nigeria, see the account of Lord Lugard who was one of the pivotal figures that
provided its philosophical underpinnings, Frederick, John Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical
Africa (Edinburgh, London: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1922) and, Lugard and the Amalgamation of Nigeria
(London: Cass, 1968).
972
“Sawaba Declaration, August 8th, 1950, Kano,” Manifesto of the Northern Elements Progressive Union,
NEPU Papers.
973
Ibid.
974
Ibid.
975
The NPC was founded in 1949 as an all-inclusive organization. Following the elimination of the
radicals from it who were later associated with NEPU, the NPC was transformed into a political party in
1952 and became a suitable instrument for the use of conservative politicians.
976
Ahmed, Beita Yusuf, A Freedom Fighter: Annotated Memoirs of Mallam Illah Ringim, 16.
977
See below for author’s additional critique of the radicals’ attempt at class analysis in these colonial
social formations.
978
See discussion of this 1953 Kano crisis in chapter six.
979
Islam does denounce wealth obtained through usury, i.e., charges of high interest rates on loans.
980
“Manifesto of the Northern Elements Progressive Union,” NEPU Papers.
981
Ibid.
359
982
This was said to be at the urging of Eyo Ita during his recent visit in order that women would be able to
send their delegates to conferences in Nigeria and elsewhere. See “Northern Women’s Association,”
Police Intelligence Reports, 10.5.51, NEPU Papers.
983
“Northern Elements Progressive Union, Police Intelligence Reports, 16.5.51,” NEPU Papers.
984
It sought to penetrate both rural and urban peasant, deep into the heart of the peasantry in Northern
Nigeria, by invoking Hausa-Fulani traditional values and symbols. NEPU also attempted to set up
branches in Southern Nigeria.
985
Ahmed, Beita Yusuf, A Freedom Fighter: Annotated Memoirs of Mallam Illah Ringim.
986
See details of his persecution below as recorded in his memoirs, “Memoirs of Mallam Ringim,” in
Ahmed, Beita Yusuf, A Freedom Fighter: Annotated Memoirs of Mallam Illah Ringim.
987
Ibid., 26.
988
“NEPU, Declaration of Principle October, 1952,” NEPU Papers.
989
The Party's popular emblem was a 5-cornered star with the star and crescent of Islam. Its motto:
Girmama Ubangiji, Gama kan da Tarmakon Juma (Glorification of God, Unity and Cooperation) was
based on important Islamic symbols and maxims. It attempted to stimulate reformist responses within the
populace by invoking the notion of Askianism. One of the few Western-educated Northerners identified
with the movement, Mallam Aminu Kano, had an Askianist movement or Aminiyya movement started after
him within NEPU. Aminu Kano, who was of Fulani aristocratic background himself, was hailed as the
Askia of modern times. He became the president of NEPU in 1951 and its Life-president in 1958 by which
time, under him, NEPU was already losing its sharp edges as well as its more leftwing-oriented adherents.
990
NEPU Papers, 10.
991
Ibid. The Governor of Nigeria, Sir John Macpherson, in 1952 would juxtapose these “extremists” with
“the decent simple peasants” - the very ones, i.e., the talakawas, that the NEPU set itself up to “liberate”
from the throes of a system it perceived to be keeping them in subjugation.
992
Ibid.
993
Ibid., 23.
994
Richard Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties: Power in an Emergent African Nation, 321.
995
See chapter five for more detailed discussion of the provisions in the 1951Constitution.
996
See, for example, “Letter to NEPU read at meeting of the Kano Branch on 7 November, 1950 regarding
information on the end of the war in Korea,” NEPU Papers, 12.
997
“Letter from Secretary of NEPU, signed Bello Ijumu, to President, The Committee of World Congress
of the Defenders of Peace,” Appendix 1, NSB/R.121, NEPU Papers.
998
Ibid.
999
“Telegram from Kano dated 5th July, 1951, to Lt. Fenner Brockway, 8 Hillside Gardens, London, N.6,”
NEPU Papers.
1000
NEPU Papers.
1001
At this time in the 50s, Wallace-Johnson was carrying on his radical critique mainly from within the
Sierra Leone legislature. His pre-war period of social protest had involved working fearlessly through
extra-institutional channels in the colonies as well as within British institutions in Britain to seek for social
change in the colonies, as revealed earlier in chapter three. He was active in petitioning officials in the
Colonial Office to democratize the structure of government in the colonies. In 1945, as Organizing
Secretary of Dr. Harold Moody’s League of Colored Peoples’ branch in Sierra Leone, he had written to the
Under Secretary of State to protest against the “undemocratic” nature of the Freetown Municipality
Ordinance which he complained gave the Governor “a sort of despotic power.” His post-World War II
career had involved a shift towards seeking social change through constitutional means as a member of the
Sierra Leone Legislative Council in the 50s. There, in the Legislature, he continued to carry on his
360
discourse of a new Sierra Leonean state. He still retained his critical perspective and outspokenness, but he
was less vituperative. He severely criticized the shortcomings of the new Sierra Leone Constitution of
1951 as undemocratic and as constraining the development of a nationwide political party which he felt
would augur well for the unity of the country. He was also critical of the government, in particular the
newly-elected African Ministers for Local Government, Education and Welfare, Mr. A. Milton Margai, and
the Minister for Lands, Mines and Labour, Mr. Siaka P. Stevens, who he said were mere armchair
ministers. Wallace-Johnson was critical of the lack of concern for, and discussion of issues that affected a
wide cross-section of the Sierra Leone people especially by these African ethnopolitical entrepreneurs who
were now in the colonies’ Legislative and Executive Councils and had been elected to represent the people.
Unlike them, Wallace-Johnson tried to use his presence in the Legislative Council to advocate for the
grassroots and to privilege a discourse of the nation and of citizenship in all-inclusive terms.
1002
See discussion of this political trait in Azikiwe and Nkrumah in chapter five.
1003
Chapters five and eight discuss Azikiwe’s and Nkrumah’s periodic expulsion of these radicals from the
NCNC and the CPP.
1004
See chapter three for further exploration of this.
1005
West Africa, August 25, 1962, 935. Nduka Eze, a socialist-oriented labor trade union leader, referred in
these terms to leftwing-oriented discussions that ex-servicemen who had been influenced by British
leftwing intellectuals in the army during the war had with them on their return home.
1006
Osita Agwuma, “A Call to Revolution,” Lecture delivered at Tom Jones Memorial Hall, Lagos,
Nigeria, on October 27th, 1948, reprinted in Philip Adaiyi Ohiare, Late Alhaji Habib Raji Abdallah's
Memorial Pamphlet (Nigeria: Nigerian Herald, 1983), 33, and also in West African Pilot (WAP),
November 9, 1948. Agwuna was sentenced to 3 years imprisonment on charges of sedition. Other Zikists
leaders accused of complicity in this lecture were jailed for various lengths of imprisonment after the trial.
1007
Osita Agwuma, “A Call to Revolution,” 18.
1008
Ibid.
1009
Lenin’s works on the national colonial question represented the orthodox Marxian position on the
question. One of Lenin’s most important pre-revolutionary writings in which he dealt with the question of
colonialism is, Vladimir I. Lenin, Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International
Publishers, 1939). This question was expanded and given a specific focus in his subsequent works on the
national and colonial question. See, for example, Vladimir. I. Lenin, The Right of Nations to Selfdetermination (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979). For another of Lenin’s important writings in which
he dealt with the national question, see, Vladimir I. Lenin, Critical Remarks on the National Question
(Moscow: Foreign languages Pub House, 1951), and, Lenin on the National Liberation Movement (Peking:
Foreign Languages Press, 1960). For deviationist trend from Marxism-Leninism on the national and
colonial question, see, J. V. Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Questions (San Francisco:
Proletarian Publishers, 1975). This deviationist trends in Stalinism was at the heart of the great TrotskyStalin controversy. These issues in relation to West Africa were explored to some extent in some of my
earlier papers.
1010
The Zikist movement is examined in the following section.
1011
The rank and file workers in the General Strike and radical trade unionists wanted their demands to be
met before the strike could be called off.
1012
See, Sir R. Saloway, “The New Gold Coast,” International Affairs 31, no. 4 (October 1955): 470-471.
1013
Nwafor Orizu was regarded as one of the founders of this movement and to have coined the term,
Zikism. However, he was more politically radical than socially radical and became more of a mainstream
politician thereafter. Orizu was from a royal household in Onitsha province, Eastern Nigeria. In 1938, he
went to the United States as part of a group of eight Nigerian students sponsored by Nnamdi Azikiwe. He
graduated from Ohio State University with a B. Sc. degree in 1942 and from Columbia University in 1944
with a Master’s degree in government and public law. The same year, he published his well-known book,
Nwafor Orizu, Without Bitterness: Western Nations in Post-War Africa (New York: Creative Age Press,
361
1944). Orizu also studied political theory at Lincoln and Harvard Universities. He returned to Nigeria in
1945. In 1948 he was among the founders of the Ibo State Union and was elected to the Eastern House of
Assembly in 1951. In 1959 he was appointed as a special member of the Eastern House of Chiefs and
subsequently became a Federal Senator at Nigeria’s independence, rising to the post of President of Senate.
Attempts made by me to conduct an interview with him, first in August, 1990 at his palace in Nnewi and
before his death were unsuccessful. In the August, 1990 attempt at his residence in Nnewi, he was kind
enough to show up, accompanied by a caretaker, but he was at the time too ill to conduct a proper
interview. He died before a rescheduled interview could take place.
1014
As a result of Raji Abdallah’s radical activism and association with the Zikist Movement and the
radical NEPU he was dismissed from the government civil service in Northern Nigeria after which he took
an appointment as NCNC field secretary.
1015
Osita C. Agwuna was Vice-President of the Zikist movement.
1016
Late Alhaji Habib Raji Abdallah's Memorial Pamphlet, 12.
1017
Mokwugo Okoye, Storms on the Niger, 142.
1018
Ibid., 136.
1019
Richard L. Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties: Power in an Emergent African Nation, 76.
1020
Ibid., 80. The three top officers of the NNFL, M.A.O. Imoudu (President), F.O. Coker (VicePresident), and Nduka Eze (Secretary) assumed the same posts in the NLC.
1021
See Wogu Ananaba, The Trade Union Movement in Nigeria (Apapa, Lagos: Times Press Limited,
1969).
1022
This was after the Zikist Movement had been proscribed by the government in 1950 consequent to the
attempted assassination of the Chief Secretary to the Nigerian Government, Sir Hugh Foot, in February
1950 by a Zikist, Chukuwonka Ugokwu, and as a result of other disturbances in which the Zikists were
implicated by the government. See “The Zikist Movement,” Enclosure 24, CO 537/5807, PRO.
1023
Richard L. Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties: Power in an Emergent African Nation, 75.
1024
The leadership of the radical wing of the movement, composed mainly of labor radicals, also claimed
some level of Western education and a modicum of exposure to Marxism-Leninism among their
credentials.
1025
“Unlawful Society: Zikist Movement,” Nigerian Gazette, 27, no. 21, Lagos, 13 April 1950, in CO
537/5807, PRO.
1026
Ibid.
1027
“The Zikist Movement,” Colonial Office Secret Document to J. K. Thompson, British Embassy,
Washington, CO 537.5807, PRO.
1028
Amsterdam News, New York, April 9, 1950, in CO 537/5807, PRO.
1029
“The Zikist Movement,” Enclosure 24, CO 537/5807, PRO.
1030
See chapter eight for official satisfaction of the effectiveness of such cooperation especially in regard to
Nkrumah.
1031
This attempt, however, only served to heighten the crisis of empire as the radicals sought to make their
presence felt in other ways.
1032
Chapter five discusses this shift among colonial authorities and also the shift among certain African
politicians.
1033
Gold Coast Legislative Council Debates, Session, 25th February, 1954.
1034
“Assessment of Anti-Communist Propaganda,” in “Political Developments: Gold Coast,” Accra, April
23, 1956, United Kingdom Information Office in the Gold Coast, CO 554/1177, PRO.
362
1035
Officialdom’s concessions to the “moderates” because of their fear of radicals is developed more fully
in chapter eight.
1036
“Assessment of Anti-Communist Propaganda,” in “Political Developments: Gold Coast,” Accra, April
23, 1956, United Kingdom Information Office in the Gold Coast, CO 554/1177, PRO.
1037
See above for Hajiyya Sawaba’s detailed account of her experience. The account of Ringim’s illtreatment is detailed below.
1038
Ringim was the leader of the NEPU branch in Kano. See his memoir in Ahmed, Beita Yusuf, A
Freedom Fighter: Annotated Memoirs of Mallam Illah Ringim.
1039
“Mallam Illah: Personal Narrative,” dictated to Malam Gulma in Hausa while he was in prison,
recorded in Yusuf, A Freedom Fighter: Annotated Memoirs of Mallam Illah Ringim, 43.
1040
Ibid., 43-44.
1041
Such radical organizations and movements, however, left important legacy for future generation of
activists and policymakers, and hence remains of importance.
1042
“Northern Women's Association,” Police Intelligence Report, 10.5.51, NEPU Papers.
1043
Ibid., 16. The decline was also deemed to be tied to the 7s. 6d subscription fee. Men also deterred their
wives from attending and threatened them with divorce. Sawaba also confirmed this in my interview with
her and said that women were threatened by their husbands and were told that if they supported her they
would be driven out of their home.
1044
“Northern Women's Association,” Police Intelligence Report, 10.5.51, NEPU Papers.
1045
“Unlawful Society: Zikist Movement,” Nigerian Gazette, 27, no 21, Lagos 13 April 1950, CO
537/5807, PRO.
1046
One of the publications said to have been found with Okoye was called “Workers of Nigeria Revolt.”
The document said to have been found with Nzimiro, according to the prosecution, was titled, “National
Command.” Nzimiro’s defense counsel admitted that Nzimiro had the document but claimed he was
unable to decipher it. Reported in Daily Mirror, 8 March 1950, newspaper extracts in CO 537/5807, PRO.
1047
These were predicated, in part, on what had earlier been noted in chapter two of this study as uneven
development related to the nature of colonial capitalist penetration of these societies.
1048
Aspects of this are examined in chapters two and six.
1049
Roger Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, 248-251. This is also generic to political mobilization and
representation.
1050
See discussion of this crisis in chapter six.
1051
See, Laurent Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life
(Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
1052
Daily Times, May 7, 1955.
1053
Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by
Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 180-5
1054
Ibid.
1055
Laurent Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life
(Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1991). This is one of four clusters of meaning that Raymond
Williams identified culture with. See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society,
1780-1950, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 90.
1056
See Raymond William’s 1958 essay, “Culture is Ordinary,” in Resources of Hope: Culture,
Democracy, Socialism, 3-28.
363
1057
Abner Cohen, Two Dimensional Man: An Essay on the Anthropology of Power and Symbolism in
Complex Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 23.
1058
See account of this in chapter six.
1059
Amilcar Cabral, National Liberation, 147, and Unity and Struggles: Speeches and Writings, trans. by
Michael Wolfers (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1979).
1060
Amilcar Cabral, Unity and Struggle, 147.
1061
This theme was successfully explored in this my Masters’ dissertation. See Nike Edun, “The Action
Group and the Failure to Evolve into a National Party,” M. A. Dissertation, University of Birmingham,
Birmingham, Great Britain, 1975.
Chapter 8
1062
For my earlier exploration of these themes, see, for example, Nike Adebiyi, “Radical Nationalism and
the Politics of Anticolonialism in British West Africa, 1940-1960,” Paper presented at the Project on
International Communism, Conference III, Metropolitan and Third World Lefts, 1917-1985, University of
Michigan, January 27, 1989, and “Radical Nationalism in British West Africa, 1945-56,” unpublished draft
of doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1994@..
1063
“[West Africa]: memorandum by A. B. Cohen on Anglo-French relations: survey of constitutional
progress in British territories,” [Extract], 20 Nov 1951, CO 537/7148, no 17, [228], reprinted in Ronald
Hyam (ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. II: The Labour Government and the
End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London: HMSO, 1992), 77. A. B. Cohen was the Assistant UnderSecretary of State from 1947 to 1951.
1064
Ibid.
1065
“Amendment of the Gold Coast constitution: Cabinet memorandum by Mr. Lyttelton,” 9 Feb 1952,
CAB 129/49, C (52)28, [265], reprinted in David Goldsworthy (ed.), British Documents on the End of
Empire. Series A, Vol. III: The Conservative Government and the End of Empire 1951-1957, Part 2
(London: HMSO, 1994), 187-188.
1066
For some discussion of these official labels and categorization, see chapter three.
1067
A leading NEPU activists, Lawan Dambazu, once described NEPU in such terms. Quoted in Alan
Feinstein, African Revolutionary: The Life and Times of Nigeria’s Aminu Kano, 152.
1068
These were willing to work within the status quo to realize their mutual agenda of political change from
the top.
1069
See, for example, Nike Adebiyi, “Radical Nationalism and the Politics of Anticolonialism in British
West Africa, 1940-1960,” and, “Radical Nationalism in British West Africa, 1945-56.”
1070
USCIA Reports: Communism in Africa, 1945-1960, cited in Nike Adebiyi, “Radical Nationalism and
the Politics of Anticolonialism in British West Africa, 1940-1960,” 1989, and ‘Radical Nationalism in
British West Africa, 1945-60,” 1994@.
1071
USCIA Reports: Communism in Africa, 1945-1960.
1072
“[West Africa]: memorandum by A B Cohen on Anglo-French relations: survey of constitutional
progress in British territories,” [Extract], 20 Nov 1951, CO 537/7148, no 17, [228], reprinted in Ronald
Hyam (ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. II: The Labour Government and the
End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London: HMSO, 1992), 77.
1073
Ibid.
1074
These reforms involved social legislations leading to the eight-hour day, social insurance legislation,
electoral reforms, tax reforms, public housing, votes for women (in the Netherlands between 1918-20) in
364
countries such as France, Britain, Belgium and Scandinavia. Geoff Eley noted that in all these cases, ‘a
local chemistry of shop militancy, union growth, and government anxiety combined with anti-revolutionary
paranoia fed by Bolshevik efforts at spreading the international revolution and the real explosions in
Germany and Italy, to produce packages of significant reforms.’ See, for example, Geoff Eley, “Reviewing
the Socialist Tradition,” CSST Working Paper, no. 43, April 1990.
1075
For example, in the West Indies, i.e., British Guyana, etc.
1076
L. H. Gorsuch to H. M. Foot, Nigerian Secretariat, Lagos, CO 537/5807, PRO.
1077
Ibid.
1078
The shift of these African politicians as well as of official shift of position towards them are explored
and documented in chapter five.
1079
The refuseniks were the revolutionaries of late Tsarist government in pre-communist Russia.
1080
R. E. Webb, head of British Commonwealth Section, British Information Service, to The Controller,
“Re: Visit to British Information Service of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, January 20, 1950,” CO 537/5807, PRO.
1081
The rapid pace of change and developments in the Gold Coast influenced their expectations in this way.
1082
The fact that in 1950, Azikiwe was not sure that a diarchy would be granted if asked for and within
three years was asking, along with other moderates, for self-government and that the British were holding
conferences in London for the Independence Constitution, showed the hurried and fast pace of change (in
only a spate of three years) and sharp turn of events, further validating a premise of this study as to the
precipitous nature of the grant of full-self-government to the West African colonies, starting with the Gold
Coast in 1956. It also reveals the influence of developments in the Gold Coast on the other British West
African colonies.
1083
The discourse in the Colonial Office in 1943 regarding proposed plans for devolution of power in these
colonies is revealing of the way in which all the parties were still thinking in terms of an indefinite time
period, in relative measures. O .G. R. Williams, head of the West African section in the Colonial Office, in
response to a criticism by the Governor of Sierra Leone, Hubert Stevenson, in 1943 regarding Williams’
proposed time scale for devolution of power as too short, somehow cynically remarked that, “As the plan in
this memorandum contemplated possibly a good may generations for its evolution, I can only suppose that
Sir Hubert Stevenson is thinking rather in centuries. I dare say he is right!” See Minutes by O. G. R.
Williams, 4.9.43, CO 554/132/33727, PRO. Williams’ plan, partly influenced by Lord Hailey’s views,
involved five stages and some of the proposals were partly reflected in the constitutional reviews and
changes of late 1940s/early 1950s. He had called for the formulation of Regional Councils from among the
Native Authorities (NA), the modernization of the NA by the introduction of younger and better educated
Africans, and for local men to be introduced in greater numbers into the upper echelons of the colonial
service. Stage four called for African unofficial majorities to be introduced in the Legislative Councils
while stage five, ‘towards self government’, contained no proposals whatever, except of course to perceive
self government in terms of an indefinite future. See CO 554/132/33727, PRO, for the discussion paper.
1084
Ibid. The document was meant to help provide some policy guidelines in preparation for the planned
visit of the Secretary of State, Oliver Stanley, to West Africa later on in 1943.
1085
The Trusteeship concept is well defined by Lord Lugard. See Sir Frederick Lugard, The Dual Mandate
in British Tropical Africa (Edinburgh, London: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1922). See also, Molly Mortimer,
The Trusteeship in Practice; a Report to the Fabian Colonial Bureau (London: Fabian Publication:
London, 1951).
1086
For descriptive use of the term, see, Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1982).
1087
Rita Hinden, “Partnership and What it Means,” 1946, CO 554/132/33727.
1088
This statement was attributed to Mr. W. L. S. Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Britain from 26
October, 1951-5 April, 1955.
365
1089
In France, it also included Thorez, the French Communist leader. This was somewhat in
contradistinction to the Third International’s advocacy of self-determination of subjugated societies.
Perhaps the French imperial notion of their colonies as extension of metropolitan France served to
rationalize that position. That position could also be tied to the communist school of thought that believed
in the full development of productive forces in such subjugated and ‘backward’ societies through such
phase of imperial domination by more developed nations.
1090
Nigerian Legislative Council Debates, March 5, 1945.
1091
Ibid. When the Constitution was enacted in 1946, the NCNC pushed for constitutional reforms to
secure ‘greater participation in the management of their own affairs’ and went on a tour of the nation to
enlighten the citizens as to the limitations of the new constitution and to push for more changes, to include
a program of positive action. This was followed with an NCNC delegation to the United Kingdom in
pursuit of the same objective. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Zik: The Development of Political Parties, 13.
1092
The concept of Trusteeship that had guided British interests in these colonies had become outmoded
and was replaced during World War II with the concept of ‘Partnership’ whose meaning was changed from
increased African participation in development and welfare to the idea of the inter-dependence of the UK
and colonial economic units. This change in terminology to the idea of complementarity of trade was an
attempt to rationalize United Kingdom’s (UK) colonial empires’ exemption from the multilateral aims of
international policy provisions in the draft I. T. O. Charter, as Bowden posited. For a valuable study and
in-depth discussion of the changing British colonial power’s notions of Partnership, and of the rationale
behind these changing concepts, see Jane Bowden, “Development and Control in British Colonial Policy:
Nigeria and the Gold Coast, 1935 – 48,” Doctoral dissertation, University of Birmingham, 1980.
1093
This idea of the “inter-dependence of the UK and colonial economic unit” and of “special relationship”
between UK and its colonies was forcefully argued by Sir Stafford Cripps, Minister of Economic Affairs,
in his speech to the African Governors Conference on the twin theme of complementarity and mutual
benefit. He stated that:
The economies of Western Europe and tropical Africa are so closely
interlocked in mutual trade … that their problems of overseas balance
are essentially one … The further development of African resources is
of the same crucial importance to the rehabilitation and strengthening
of Western Europe as the restoration of European productive power is
to the future progress and prosperity of Africa.
Quoted in Jane Bowden, “Development and Control in British Colonial Policy: Nigeria and the Gold Coast,
1935-48,” 362. In reality, what was advocated, as Bowden noted, was a short term solution to the UK’s
financial problems that artificially reinforced the pre-war complementary pattern of colonial trade, a trend
which went against all war-time statements of the promotion of balanced growth in the Colonial Empire.
1094
See, for example, Nike Adebiyi, “Radical Nationalism and the Politics of Anticolonialism in British
West Africa, 1940-1960,’ 1989, and ‘Radical Nationalism in British West Africa, 1945-60,’ 1994@.
1095
The crisis at the level of the colonial state had also involved major contradictions of British imperial
rule as well as the crisis of policy.
1096
See also chapters four and five for the development of this theme.
1097
“[Gold Coast and Nigeria]: letter from Sir T Lloyd to Governor Sir J Macpherson explaining Gold
Coast policy,” 25 Mar 1953, CO 554/254, no 29, [270], reprinted in David Goldsworthy (ed.), British
Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. III, The Conservative Government and the End of Empire
1951-1957, Part 2 (London: HMSO, 1994), 193. Lloyd was recalling the comment of the Secretary of State
to Nkrumah to Governor Macpherson.
1098
Nkrumah and the regimes that followed him in the Gold Coast, as well as post-independence
governments in Nigeria and Sierra Leone had indeed had to confront and continue to confront the crises of
nationhood in these places. As of 2008, however, some of the new African states appear to be better placed
366
to fairly successfully confront some of these challenges, after phases of civil wars, military coups, etc.,
especially in Nigeria and Ghana (Gold Coast).
1099
Lower-ranking and middle-level colonial officials in the colonies had to be persuaded to follow the
wind of change blowing from the Colonial Office in this regard.
1100
“[Gold Coast and Nigeria]: letter from Governor Sir J Macpherson to Sir T Lloyd on the impact of
Gold Coast policy on Nigeria, 8 Jan 1952,” CO 967/173, [262], reprinted in David Goldsworthy (ed.),
British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. III, The Conservative Government and the End of
Empire 1951-1957, Part 2 (London: HMSO, 1994), 179-182.
1101
Mr. J. Griffiths became Secretary of State for the Colonies under the Labor Government for a brief
period after Arthur Creech-Jones left the post, from 28 February 1950 till 27 October, 1951 when the Tory
came into power and was succeeded by Mr. O. Lyttelton.
1102
“[Gold Coast and Nigeria]: letter from Governor Sir J Macpherson to Sir T Lloyd on the impact of
Gold Coast policy on Nigeria, 8 Jan 1952,” 179. These concessions included the agreement to allow
Nkrumah change his title from Leader of Government Business to Prime Minister, the removal of the exofficio members of the Gold Coast Executive, and possible liquidation of all District Officers over a period
of five years. Arden-Clarke had stopped in Nigeria and met with Governor Macpherson on his way to
London to discuss these agreements and the future of the Gold Coast with H. M. G. It was at this brief
airport meeting that Macpherson learnt of the discussions that had taken place between Nkrumah and
Griffiths many months back as well as of Creech-Jones’ readiness during his tenure to allow further
political advance to Nkrumah. Macpherson also expressed profound shock at not being told previously of
these conversations that had taken place between Creech-Jones and Nkrumah.
1103
Ibid., 180.
1104
Ibid.
1105
Ibid.
1106
Ibid.
1107
Ibid., 181.
1108
“[Gold Coast and Nigeria]: inward telegram no 337 from Governor Sir J Macpherson to Sir T Lloyd,
explaining the effects of Gold Coast policy on Nigeria, 16 Mar 1953,” CO 554/254, no 20, [269], reprinted
in David Goldsworthy (ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. III: The Conservative
Government and the End of Empire 1951-1957, Part 2 (London: HMSO, 1994), 191. Macpherson would
prefer that the demands of Nkrumah and the other CPP leaders in government be not met and would
recommend the use of force should riots and disturbances ensue in the Gold Coast as a result of this refusal.
1109
“[Gold Coast constitution]: minutes by Sir C Jeffries and Mr. Lyttelton, 9 Feb 1953,” CO 554/254,
[267], reprinted in David Goldsworthy (ed.), British Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. III:
The Conservative Government and the End of Empire 1951-1957, Part 2 (London: HMSO, 1994), 189. He
would resign himself to taking things as they were and to considering what best could be done in the
circumstance in the Gold Coast.
1110
“[Gold Coast and Nigeria]: letter from Sir T Lloyd to Governor Sir J Macpherson explaining Gold
Coast Policy, 25 Mar 1953,” CO 554/254, no 29, [270], reprinted in David Goldsworthy (ed.), British
Documents on the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. III: The Conservative Government and the End of Empire
1951-1957, Part 2 (London: HMSO, 1994), 193. This was also in response to Macpherson’s earlier
expressed inclination towards officialdom’s possible use of force to quell any disturbances that might
break out in the Gold Coast as a result of failure to continue to grant rapid concessions there.
1111
“Constitutional developments in the Gold Coast and Nigeria: Cabinet memorandum by Mr. Lyttelton,”
13 May 1953, CAB 129/61, C(53)154, [271]. reprinted in David Goldsworthy (ed.), British Documents on
the End of Empire. Series A, Vol. III: The Conservative Government and the End of Empire 1951–1957,
Part 2 (London: HMSO, 1994), 194.
1112
Minute by A. J. Dawe 27.9.39, CO 554/122/33632, PRO.
367
1113
“[Gold Coast constitution]: address by Mr. Griffiths to Colonial Group of the Royal Empire Society, 1
May 1951,” CO 96/820/2, no 39, [225], reprinted in Ronald Hyam (ed.), British Documents on the End of
Empire. Series A, Vol. II: The Labour Government and the End of Empire 1945-1951, Part 3 (London:
HMSO, 1992), 69. Griffiths was not opposed to change in principle, but to what he perceived to be rapid
and indiscriminate pace of change in the Gold Coast and the rest of the West African colonies.
1114
Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Disturbances in the Gold Coast, 1948.
1115
See Irene Gendzier, Managing Political Change: Social Scientists and the Third World.
1116
Economic development was being planned at the same time as there continued to be a lag in political
development leading to, i.e., political stasis.
1117
Joseph Engwenyu, in his study of labor and politics in the Gold Coast, 1947-1950, also affirm that up to
1948 and beyond, the intention of the colonial state was to reform Indirect Rule, i.e., improve the conduct
of empire and not hasten its end. See Joseph Engwenyu, “Labour and Politics in Ghana: The Militant
Phase 1947-1950,’ 18.
1118
Jane Bowden, “Development and Control in British Colonial Policy: Nigeria and the Gold Coast, 193548,” 187.
1119
Ibid.
1120
For example, in Governor Macpherson’s 8th January, 1952 letter to Sir T Lloyd which reiterated some
of the underlying tenets of British imperial position and argued against hurried political changes and
devolution of power in the Gold Coast, he advocated self-government for the colonies, in his case Nigeria,
at the time when “the then Governor of Nigeria would be in a position to report to the Secretary of State
that public opinion throughout Nigeria was so overwhelmingly pro-good government and pro-British
ideals, institutions and practices, that he could safely advocate complete self-government.” See “[Gold
Coast and Nigeria]: letter from Governor Sir J Macpherson to Sir T Lloyd on the impact of Gold Coast
policy on Nigeria, 8 Jan 1952,” BDEE, 181.
1121
Self-government was being asked for by both the ‘moderates’ in the legislatures and by those outside
the institutions of power. The latter, perceived to be asking for it by force were also perceived to be
irresponsible and pro-communist.
1122
See, for example, John Michael Lee, Colonial Development and Good Government (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1967).
1123
See, Curtis R. Nordman, “Prelude to Decolonization in West Africa: The Development of British
Colonial Policy, 1938 – 1947,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, Oxford University, 1976, John Michael
Lee, Colonial Development and Good Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), and R. D. Pearce, The
Turning Point in Africa: British Colonial Policy, 1938 –1948 (London: Cass, 1982).
1124
J. H. Bowden, “Development and Control in British Colonial Policy: Nigeria and the Gold Coast, 193548.”
1125
John W. Cell, “On the Eve of Decolonization: The Colonial Office’s Plan for the Transfer of Power in
Africa, 1947,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 8, no. 3 (May 1980): 250-256.
1126
Ibid.
1127
The crises at the level of local African society were, as revealed in preceding chapters, at an important
level, crises of social change - crises engendered by competition among colonials for access to power and
resources and to the means by which they were controlled; crises of democracy, etc.
1128
Arthur Richards, later Lord Milverton, the Governor of Nigeria under whom the 1946 Nigerian
Constitution was passed and who it was named after, remarked in his later reminiscences of how no
instruction was given to him regarding his future responsibility when he was appointed governor of the
various territories to which he was assigned at different times. He remarked that he was given only
geographic information, and nothing about policy, nor was he consulted for advice on any subject after he
368
retired from his tour of duty in these different British colonies. See A. F. Milverton, “Tape recording and
transcripts of an interview with A. H. M. Kirk-Greene,” MSS Brit. Emp.s.368, Rhodes House Oxford.
1129
Perham’s view at the Consultative meeting between colonial officials and prominent university scholars
at Carleton Hotel on October 6, 1939, which was called in officialdom’s attempt to deal with one level of
contradiction in British colonial policy in regard to two mutually divergent forms of rule in one territory:
local authority rule (Indirect Rule) and Central government along Western Parliamentary system
(Legislative Councils), gained popular acceptance among the academicians but remained in the minority.
Margery Perham had favored the Native Authority structure as solution to the problem of native rule.
Colonial officials were opposed to her views and preferred to see Indirect Rule as a means to an end,
preferring Reginald Coupland’s more liberal view that suggested constitutional advance along
parliamentary lines for the colonies, even though they continued to straddle both paths. CO 847/17/47135,
PRO.
1130
See chapter three for earlier discussions of officialdom’s perceptions of labor in the colonies.
1131
See, for example, Jon Kraus, “The Political Economy of Industrial Relations in Ghana.”
1132
See, Ukandi G. Damachie, Dieter H. Seibel, and Lester Trachtman, eds., Industrial Relations in Africa,
7.
1133
See, Irene Gendzier, Managing Political Change: Social Scientists and the Third World.
1134
David Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885-1925 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
1135
See chapters three and seven for further discussion.
1136
See LaRay Denzer, “I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson and the West African Youth League: A Case Study in
West African Nationalism.”
1137
CO 267/666/32216/1938, PRO. See chapter three for discussion of Wallace-Johnson and officialdom’s
attitudes towards him.
1138
Given official hostility against her, it is even surprising that she managed to get into the ECC interim
council. Perhaps to not allow her would have created more volatile situations at the time, given her popular
base of suppor